Selling night-crawlers at age 13 might not seem like an auspicious start to an entrepreneurial career, but to upstate New York native Anie Stanley, incorporating “strange things from the woods” into her businesses comes naturally. A painter and filmmaker, Stanley received a Master’s Degree in art from Hunter College in New York City and served as the art director for the queer film festival MIX for several years, eventually becoming a visual display artist at Bergdorf Goodman. In 2004 she returned to the mountains and founded Smokey Belles Catskills, a queer multimedia artists’ residency in Narrowsburg, NY that provides a supportive environment for working artists and writers amid bucolic forests and streams. Stanley is also the proprietor of Albino Moose Designs from the Rural Routes, an interior design, restoration and custom prop-styling venture with a rustic aesthetic.
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