Elena Dao Jing Yu

Elena Dao Jing Yu is an interdisciplinary artist from Culver City who has lived in Joshua Tree since 2016. Her practice is currently focused on exploring social, spiritual and scientific relationships between objects, humans, and ecology. She works in textiles, sculpture, performance and video. She also works as a clothing and home-goods designer and seamstress under the name Bao Bao, and as a community arts organizer. She has exhibited, performed and hosted workshops at Real Pain (NY), Olympia (NY), the Hammer Museum (LA), the wulf (LA), Royal NoneSuch Gallery (Oakland), Quality Coins (Yucca Valley), the Beatnik Lounge (Joshua Tree), the Glass Outhouse Art Gallery (Wonder Valley), and numerous other artist-run spaces. She has been an artist-in-residence at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Carrizozo AIR. 

As an arts organizer, Elena currently works as Program Director of Morongo Basin for Arts Connection, and has worked in the past as the Assistant Director of Programming for High Desert Test Sites (2016-2022), and as a Program Intern at the MAK Center and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her arts organizing emphasis is on developing public programs and exhibitions that consider and care for all aspects of a community ecosystem; bringing together local residents, artists, partnering organizations, and sites around experimental contemporary art.  She is currently working on programming at the Sky Village Swap Meet and The Firehouse, a former volunteer fire station in North Joshua Tree. Elena received her BA in Art from University of California.