About

Jan Estep is an all-around creative. She approaches life with curiosity and compassion, attuned to the shifting patterns of energy that surround us. Her daily practice combines visual arts, writing, singing and chanting, meditation, yoga, and time outside, and her recent creative projects explore the relationship between art, spirituality, and the potential of creativity to help people grow and heal. Mindfulness, art, music, and nature have been central to her own healing. At various times in her life she has been an exhibiting visual artist, academic philosopher, art critic and published writer, magazine editor, long-time university arts professor, meditation and yoga instructor, and community songleader.

As a visual artist Estep has worked in a wide range of media including drawing, painting, video, photography, sculpture, artist books, site-specific maps, and other printed matter. Coming to art through first studying philosophy, Estep's early work is heavily conceptual, exploring the relationship between language, image, and reality, and the way theories of knowledge shape our understanding of the world. Always interdisciplinary, over the years, seeking greater bodymind integration, and drawing on Buddhist and yogic traditions, her focus shifted to participatory, intuitive/non-conceptual, and process-based approaches to artmaking. Her published writing has also primarily focused on the arts. A growing emphasis on combining somatic, contemplative, and creative practices now shapes her creative research. She is excited about the recent expansion into singing, chanting, song-leading, and music-making.

As an educator Estep is committed to mindful, embodied, and experiential ways of learning. In addition to her degrees in biology/art (BA), studio art (MFA) and philosophy (MA, PhD), she is trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) from UMass Medical School Center for Mindfulness, Kundalini Yoga (KRI Levels 1 and 2, 520hr TT), Prana Vinyasa Flow with Shiva Rea (200hr TT), Emotional Liberation with GuruMeher Khalsa, Art and Yoga with Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa, and a wide range of song-leading and chanting styles. Continued study complements and invigorates her teaching.

Seeking greater connection to nature and wide open spaces — and drawn to the beauty of red-rock-canyon, high-desert, and alpine-forest lands — Estep recently relocated full-time to rural southwest Colorado with her husband and three dogs, transitioning from her longtime position as tenured Professor of Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Info

Cortez, CO, USA

jestep@umn.edu