Author Spotlight
Riley Atkinson
Even from the front row seats of the Kansas City Ballet, she couldn’t see the dancers’ faces or any fine details of the set design.
Her visual impairment limited her view to the flowy figure of the cape that Dracula wore and the dark color of the dresses that moved like a wave. She could hear the haunting, church-like-toned choir from the balcony and felt chills creep up her legs.
She felt scared — but the edge-of-her-seat kind of scared. She loved it.
She needed to know what went on behind the scenes to evoke those emotions in an audience.
East alum Elsa Goodmon was diagnosed at birth with a rare condition that makes her legally blind — she says she even learned braille when she was younger. Now, she’s two years into a visual arts degree at Cornish College with a portfolio that shares more than 30 of her best art pieces, and she’s designed several performance productions both for class and as a hobby.
Her eyes fail to produce enough pigment, which restricts her from seeing perfectly clear up close or anything far away, but the zoom tool on her iPad and a support system at school have helped her create artwork despite her impairment.
Her younger sister, junior Abby Goodmon, constantly notices the wide eyes when people hear she’s a legally blind visual arts student. But everyone is impressed — she just creates fantastic art, Abby says.
“It’s become one of those things where you have a disability for so long that you learn to function at a different level,” Elsa said.
Her art setup is a comfort spot. She knows other artists who prop their sketchbook up outside to draw, but she can’t do that. Outside doesn’t work — too much glare, too many shadows — so she loves her dorm room desk. Since she can control the lighting and have all sorts of technology available to her, she hunches over the iPad to work on “little” personal projects — a recent one was redesigning all of the costumes for The Nutcracker.
“Yeah, she’s the artistic one in the family,” Abby said. “She does that stuff in her free time, so to her sometimes it doesn’t even feel like work, it’s just like something she loves to do.”
She gets startled easily when she’s in the zone, according to her freshman-year roommate Bee Bolino — nothing Elsa ever does is half-hearted. Bolino says it’s not long after they watch a show together that Elsa will sketch up a character inspired by the plotline. Art is Elsa’s thing, and she gets lost in her creations almost every day.
“Hours can go by, I’ll look up and it’s dark outside and I’m like, ‘Oh?’” Elsa said.
At East, she was enrolled in four years of theater and practically every art class possible. Her drawing and photography teacher Adam Finkleston said it wasn’t the lack of eyesight that set her apart — it was her creativity. He noticed when she’d put her face right up next to the paper while working with fine lines, but that didn’t hinder her work — it was better than most students.
He has no doubts she’ll be successful in her production design classes and career simply because she has the passion and skills for it.
The college costume design coursework includes anything from carefully selecting lighting for a show to doing “grunt” work like sewing a last-minute patch onto a costume — but she actually enjoys how much it stimulates her brain, even if she gets frustrated at times.
She’s had to find her own way of doing practically everything as a visual arts student. When she’s sewing a garment, she purposefully pricks herself so she can tell where she’s at with the needle. But because of her adaptations, she’s gotten so comfortable with sewing that it’s meditative now.
“I’m always learning new techniques to overcome things and to be able to function at a level that is, I don’t want to say expected of me, but at a level that other people would perform at,” Elsa said.
For a recent project, she sewed the shoulder seam four times before she was pleased with it. Elsa finds herself repeating simple stitches to achieve perfection often — she wants to prove that she can do it, and do it well.
Without depth perception, straight lines are difficult. Measurements don’t come easy either. For a final last semester, she had to make a foam-core model box of the Seattle rep theater with sizes down to the sixteenths.
“Measuring? Working with a ruler? Yikes,” Elsa said.
Those are the moments where she has to ask for help, which she really hates doing.
“I mean anybody with a disability will tell you that they really don’t like to ask for help,” Elsa said. “We want to believe that we can do everything that is set to us . . . It took me a really long time to be comfortable asking for help from people, I’m still getting used to it, especially in college.”
She says she’d rather give herself a headache than tell someone she can’t see something. Her professors understand if she can’t see a still life model from across the room or sew black thread on black fabric, so she’s grateful for their support.
“I feel like she’s come a long way in advocating for herself and saying like, ‘I need help with this assignment,’ or, ‘I can’t see what you’re doing, can you come closer and show me?’” Bolino said. “I think that’s what strikes me the most in her art and just our everyday life together that she’s really blossoming into not being afraid to ask for help, which I think is such a strength.”
Bolino and Finkelston are in agreement that she has the work ethic and creativity to achieve anything she wants — her visual impairment is just something she’s figured out how to cope with.
And with 15 years of dance experience, she understands the range of motion needed for a dance costume. She has the inside knowledge of what they’re thinking about during a costume fitting and knows the right terminology to talk to them like a fellow dancer, which makes them more comfortable and allows for easier communication.
“I think that a costume is like a compliment to a dancer’s body, it’s like a weapon in their arsenal for their art, and I love to be a part of that, and I love to give that image to them,” Elsa said.
One day she hopes to design costumes that little girls like her younger self will be mesmerized by — even if that means pricking herself with needles or redesigning countless garments along the way.
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