My name is Shelby Marie Skumanich.
I am an artist, photographer, quiltmaker, and writer living in Northern Colorado.
I work with image, language, and material.
I follow the threads between place, memory, and identity.
Photography is a practice of attention.
It is where I look outward, tracing the ways personal and collective histories are held in the landscape—how place shapes us, and how we, in turn, leave our mark.
Quilting is a practice of transformation.
Working with fragments—found, inherited, or worn—I stitch together narratives that do not arrive whole. Each piece becomes a record of change, a way of holding what has been lived through and reassembling it into something new.
Writing is where these threads converge.
I return to language as a tool for listening. It is an attempt to name what resists easy definition, to sit inside contradiction, to let meaning emerge rather than resolve.
I return to the idea that identity is not fixed.
Everything and everyone becomes.
We are constructed, unraveled, and reimagined again and again.
I am interested in how we live inside our own stories with intention
and how we might rewrite them to live lives we thought were only imaginary.
I received my BFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design, where I studied photography, new media, bookmaking, and art history. My work has been exhibited across the United States, and my quilts and photographs have received national recognition.
Alongside my studio practice, I work in communications, specializing in storytelling, web design, and community-centered media to help others articulate who they are and why it is important.
Outside of my work, I study tarot, spend time in nature, and share my life with Elmer, my Flemish Giant rabbit.