About Christopher Pelham, Director of CRS

My work lives at the intersection of healing and the arts. As co-founder and director of CRS, I offer spiritual counseling, healing, and teaching rooted in A Course in Miracles. Alongside that, for nearly thirty years I have curated and produced live music, dance, theater, film, and visual arts — drawn to artists whose work opens something in the listener that ordinary life keeps shut.

Curatorial work

With musician and curator gamin, I conceived and co-produce the Crossing Boundaries and Paradise Laboratory concert series. Since 1997 I have had the privilege of presenting artists from around the world — among them Morio Agata, shakuhachi masters Ralph Samuelson and James Nyoraku Schlefer, Steinway artist and Guggenheim fellow Jen Shyu, composer and flutist Elsa Nilsson, former US jazz ambassador Scott Robinson, and choreographers Alexandra Beller, Jennifer Nugent, and Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks.

On the visual arts side, I have curated and presented the work of painters Lex Braes (Felix Ringel Galerie, Düsseldorf) and Eric Holzman (NEA and Guggenheim grantee), photographers Mao Ishikawa, Satomi Shirai (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography permanent collection), and Annie Ling (The National Museum of Iceland permanent collection), and mixed-media artists Chris de Boschnek (C24 Gallery, NYC) and Keiko Nelson (Epcot Center; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco), among many others. I also curated and presented the Life Is Art Is Motherhood Is Art exhibition in New York City and Tokyo, and as a Pick Up exhibition of the Kyotographie KG+ photography festival in Kyoto.

I am the co-founder, editor, and lead writer of Only Love ART, a publication covering music, dance, theater, and the visual arts. My photography appears there and in Downbeat, The Wire, and I Care If You Listen.

Background

I came to both healing and curation through the same door. Physical theater — four seasons with Johnny Simons’ Hip Pocket Theatre in Fort Worth, and later at venues like La MaMa ETC, HERE, and Joyce SoHo in New York City with artists such as Lake Simons, Harold Lehmann, and Guido Tuveri — taught me how performance cracks something open in people. Studying post-colonial literature and literary theory at Duke University gave me the critical language to ask why that matters. A Course in Miracles gave me the answer.

With love,
Christopher