Heidi Elbers is a painter born and raised in New Orleans who now works from a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She holds a BA in painting and drawing from Southeastern Louisiana University and an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, where she also serves as director of exhibitions. Her work fuses the elaborate costumes of Mardi Gras with imagery of the Louisiana bayou and Cajun folklore drawn from her mother's family of trappers and hunters. Elbers has exhibited at galleries including Island Weiss Gallery and The Lodge Gallery, among more than eighty shows since 2005, and her work has been covered in Gagosian Quarterly, W Magazine, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Connecting with my cultural heritage as a Louisiana native, my paintings are a fusion of the elaborate costumes of Mardi Gras, the bayou, and the magic that resonates from southeastern Louisiana. My mother grew up in the bayou as a daughter of a fur trapper and alligator hunter. Most Cajuns are skilled tradesman that carry on the family business for generations so I grew up around alligator farmers and hunters. As beautiful as the bayou is with the flora and fauna, it was also terrifying not only from the alligators, alligator gar, and poisonous snakes, but also from the Cajun folklore that I grew up around – the stories of the fue follet, rougarou, and other unexplained phenomena. Creating these paintings allow me to relate to more fundamental origins of my Cajun culture and the mystical bayou. -Heidi Elbers, 2023