SARA ELISE is a community cultivator and interdisciplinary creative, splitting her time between Brooklyn and The Catskills, New York, with experience primarily in the hospitality and design, well-being, and food industries.
She is the cofounder + designer of Apogeo Collective, a hospitality collective centering the experiences of QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color) with an internationally-based flagship hotel concept space (Apogeo Guest House). She is also the founder of Harvest & Revel, a Brooklyn-based sustainable event catering and production company who pioneered the sustainable-food movement over a decade ago, and now works with clients like Louis Vuitton House, Park Ave Armory, Carnegie Mellon Foundation, David Zwirner gallery, Instagram, Nike, and more.
For her most recent project collaborating with Ryann Holmes, she designed and opened Again Vintage, a brick-and-mortar homewares shop and cafe concept space in Brooklyn, NY that bridges the connection between community, design, gut-healing food + beverage, slowness + ritual, and celebrating home as sanctuary.
Sara Elise is also the author of A Recipe for More, her debut book released with Harper Collins in May 2023, which received praise from iconic thinkers like poet + screenwriter Fatimah Asghar, 10x grammy nominated musician + actor Janelle Monáe, and writer + speaker Rachel Cargle.
Sara Elise is a 2025 New Museum New Inc. Cohort Mentor and has been featured in Dazed, Autostraddle, Playboy, Interview Mag, Essence, Afropunk, mindbodygreen, Healthy-ish, Well + Good, Nylon, StyleLikeU, and them, among other publications. And was named one of BK Magazine's 50 Most Fascinating People in 2022.
As an autistic Black & Indigenous femme, she spends much of her thoughtspace contemplating pleasure + pain, collective joy + healing, otherness, embodiment, remembering + reclaiming, self-destruction, and growth— and how inextricably those concepts are linked. To that end, Sara Elise has deep interests in ritualization, BDSM, relationship dynamics, and the development of decolonized personal awareness and well-being.
With all of her work, she aims to challenge our collective reality by first reimagining and then creating alternative systems and spaces for Black & Indigenous people of color and LGBTQIA2S+ people to thrive.
You can join her community-making at @SaraElise333 on Instagram, and find more of her writing at saraelise.substack.com.