Shelby has been teaching for over ten years now. She has taught all age groups from pre-K to college to elderly all over the world from Texas to Germany to Spain. As an educator, she is a certified educator in English Language and Reading (7-12), Engligh as a Second Language (EC-12), and Special Education (EC-12) through both TEA (Texas Education Agency) and PELSB (Minnesota Board of Education). She also hold a Master's of Arts in English with an emphasis on rhetoric and composition and a Bachelor's degree in rhetoric and communications. 

After moving the Minnesota, she moved from the traditional public school classroom to teaching art with non-profits and art organizations. Shelby's passion is teaching the creative process through the understanding of how the brain and nervous system interact with the creative process. In 2018, Shelby went to Goa, India to study Ashtanga yoga to deepen her understanding of how intentially moving the body can help clear mental energy and in 2019, she travelled to Bonn, Germany to study how the brain and central nervous system are wired through human development and how that neurological and psychological wiring can be reconfigured and reformed. 

Using these in conjunction with Shelby's own journey as a professional artist for the past 6 years, she enjoys teaching artists of all ages and experiecnes about the creative process. She wrote the curriculum and materials for Cosmic Whiskers' (formally known as Alejandro Fine Art) Three Phase Curriculum as well as produced and created the content videos. After becoming a professional artist, she began learning how to help artists identify the blocks in their creativity that come from trauma, neurodivergence, or simply diagnosising skill gaps in an artist's creative toolbelt. 

Now, after the passing of her cats, Reddington and Willy, she is learning to go deeper into the creative process and how art can become an anchor for emotion in the present moment. She teaches that when we use art to fully surrender to the present moment, we allow our brains to enter a flow state (alpha) that encodes into memories that are not only stored in the brain, but in our bodies as well, allowing for deeper recall later. By doing so, we are better able to be present with our emotions and with the ones we love while the past is around and, once that person or experience is gone, we can continue to spend time with that person by continuing to make art about them, just as she does with Willy and Reddington (and all the things she loves). 

Going a step further, she also teaches about how we can use art to create an emotional resonance that anchors our will to create a new reality for ourselves. By creating a new experience, a new self within the art, we are training our brains to rewire into a new person. This is taught through a creative self-portraiture class that deviates from traditional technically correct self-portraiture and, rather, pulls on the idea of fan fiction and fan art to literally create a tangable representation of a new self. 

Shelby is happy to teach in the following areas:

-The Creative Process (tapping in to the flow or alpha brainwave state intentionally/helping an artist overcome dysregulation from inhibiting their art).

-Creative Writing (using traditional text-based writing i.e. short story, blog writing, journalling, novel writing, fan fiction)

-Visual Storytelling (using graphic novels/comic book story writing)

-Visual Arts (painting/sign design/

-Self-portraiture (this is a class on creating animated self-portraits to emotionally anchor the self; it is not a how-to for achieving realistic self-portraiture)

From here, let's look at the process of taking Shelby's vast experience with art and education and tailoring it to your specific needs.