Angelica “Dzeli” Palmer is an Interdisciplinary Social Practice Artist and Ritualist that explores the connections within ourselves, with each other, and with nature. Through song, dance, and storytelling, she creates visceral and emotional work rooted in the earth. For decades Angelica has led rituals, taught classes and hosted events interweaving community, activism, and the arts throughout the United States and Canada.
She is the founder of The Telegraph School, a home for the Healing & Performing Arts in Cherry Valley, NY and is the Board Treasurer for the Cherry Valley Community Facilities Corporation (“The Old School”).
Angelica is also an Accounting Consultant and founder of Green Circle Consulting. She has spent the last two decades assisting entrepreneurs to align their business with their values and to streamline their systems.
Angelica has a Masters in Creative Inquiry and Social Activism from the Experimental Performance Institute at New College of California in San Francisco and a Bachelors in Sustainable International Development and Statistics from Cornell University.
Angelica has a very strong love for her family. She is the daughter of improvisational avant garde jazz pianist Paul Bley and video artist Carol Goss, sister of musician Vanessa Bley and partner of sculptor Marc-Anthony Polizzi. She is the mother of two kind creative humans she is proud to know. Her father, sister, niece and nephew have all passed into the spirit realm and their physical loss and continued presence in her life profoundly influence her art.
She is also deeply influenced by the slow-moving deeply rooted nature of her community in Cherry Valley, NY, by the beauty and vitality of its land and water, stolen from the Kanien’kehá:ka people, and by the ancient Slavic and Animist practices of her ancestors.