Our Mission

Born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, Rachel Adams's teenage years were marked by a series of residential and group home stays. Despite lacking formal education, she ventured to California at the age of 18, embarking on various entrepreneurial pursuits, including cosmetics, production, and real estate. Eventually, she discovered her true calling in designing and operating escape rooms and immersive theater experiences, which have been her unwavering passion since 2015.

Motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Rachel founded the Immersive Arts Collective (IAC) in 2021, driven by her desire to give back to underprivileged youth and marginalized communities facing similar circumstances to her own upbringing. With IAC, Rachel seeks to bridge the gap between her personal devotion to the arts and her aspiration to empower others through artistic expression. She firmly believes that art has the potential to offer those in need the same transformative impact it has had on her life.

A native of Istanbul, Elif has explored the creative process across many modes and art forms as an artist, including opera, film, stage, immersive theater, performance arts, and multi-media installations. The Los Angeles arts scene has been a home for Elif since 2006, where she currently resides. After studying opera at the Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul and the Peabody Institute, she furthered her studies in music and dance at the conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. She is honored to serve as the Director of Events at Immersive Art Collective, where she is committed to nurturing a supportive and collaborative artistic community.

 Nick Salas has over 20 years of experience melding left and right brains to solve business problems through technology for Fortune 500 entertainment and life science companies.

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Nick is driven and inspired by intellectual and artistic curiosity. He started life with an East Coast pedagogy in public and government policy, was waylaid for a decade in Brooklyn behind thick-framed eyeglasses, and finally found a creative home in the Los Angeles-based immersive arts community. He has acted in several immersive shows at The Count's Den and Zombie Joe's Underground Theater and is an alumnus of ZJU's storied Urban Death production. He is a short fiction writer and has also written for the stage. A long-term supporter and fan of the Immersive Art Collective, Nick is committed to helping IAC promote creative risk-taking among all people-kind. 

Chase made his way to Los Angeles in 1997. The Dot.com boom was an amazing time of growth for the entertainment industry, and Chase worked his way up from PA to Production Manager, ending up in commercials and on-air comedy specials.
During summer downtime, Chase began recycling beverage containers for live events and music festivals to make supplemental income. Using the CRV refunds to mentor students to make films, he traveled to travel Costa Rica & Brazil, teaching the youth about filming, editing, and the world around them.  In 2012, he began Recycled Movie Sets as an experiment to keep scenery and construction materials out of the landfill. With a philanthropic heart and mindset, Chase built his company by hiring challenged individuals, offering a place of work, on-the-job training, and new skill sets. With continuous hard work and dedication, RecycledSets.com has kept over 12,000 set walls out of landfills and helped over 3,000 projects come to life. Chase is honored to be an advisor to Immersive Art Collective, offering his company Recycled Movie Sets as a Sponsor and occupational and vocational opportunities within the collective.

Cherie has worked in education for 15 years and has been working in recent years as a resource specialist for teens in grades 6-12. She faces many challenges when working with students with learning differences, but the most prevalent is convincing them that they have value and something to contribute. Most of them deal with depression and anxiety because their learning style does not fit into the mainstream educational system. Cherie meets with these students in private and group sessions to identify their strengths and learning style, create organizational strategies that increase executive functioning, and help them identify their gifts and talents. The reward is seeing the look of joy on their faces when they accomplish something they never believed was possible and to watch them grow in confidence and mental health. She is excited to support the staff of IAC in reaching an even broader audience through the arts made available by generous donors from all around the world.

Alfredo is the President of Hernández Government Affairs where he assists clients in all matters that include government advocacy, land use entitlement, community relations, political consulting, crisis management and non-profit management.
He served for eight years on the Los Angeles Prop K Central Region Oversight Committee serving as an appointee of Eric Garcetti and City Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell. Alfredo Has been appointed as a Delegate to the California State Democratic Party Convention by Congressmember Adam Schiff. 
A native Angeleno, Alfredo has lived in Hollywood his entire life and enjoys urban homesteading, architecture, science fiction, history, the Dodgers and the great outdoors.

Francesca Bifulco is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist from Pæstum, Southern Italy. Bifulco’s distinctive line work channels a graphical quality through her primary medium of painting, crafting a personal language that carries through large-scale canvases, textural burnt wood compositions, and multidimensional installations. Bifulco’s subjects have spanned from crowds and the force of their plurality to individuals affected by social media culture, to men playing cards in a conflicted and underrepresented neighborhood of Naples, Italy. In her current works, she processes the effects of personal loss through the preservation of memory, delves into the sociopolitical awakening in the US, and celebrates an iconic symbol of her adoptive city of Los Angeles. Her approach to the different narratives is permeated with an anthropological perspective essential to her overall creative process. Bifulco is a member of the multidisciplinary artist duo, Card 0 Collective, and the LA based-women lead IAC (Immersive Art Collective), a coalition that empowers disadvantaged youth through creative outlets.

Ian Heath is an actor/movement artist originally hailing from St. Louis, MO. He has performed all over Los Angeles with companies including Thirteenth Floor, Ultra Dark Society, MetaForYou, Unbound Productions, and Zombie Joe's Underground Theater (with whom he took the show Urban Death to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018). He has been performing at the Count's Den since 2019, and is proud to be a member of the IAC. 

Tosca Minotto (she/they) is a British-American actor and Voiceover artist whose dialect entirely depends on who they're talking to at the time. Tosca cut their teeth managing operations, performing at, and writing children's theatre for Glendale Centre Theatre, and has over a decade of arts management experience. She has performed and toured with theatre companies across Southern California, and provided VO work for children's educational apps, audio plays and audiobooks.

In her spare time, Tosca also does tarot readings with a vast library of nerdy pop-culture-themed decks as The Tarot Nerd.

Professionally, Joe Garza has extensive experience in content marketing for Silicon Valley startups, and writing about film, television, and pop culture for various outlets. Creatively, Joe is a musician and screenwriter who moved to L.A. with the dream to fail miserably in both of these fields. Since 2020, he has kept this dream alive.

Since running the student television at his alma mater, Northwestern University, Mr. Kawabata has constantly sought out ways to patronize and support the arts. He is thrilled to lend what expertise he has (what he learned in the entertainment, media, and intellectual property program at UCLA School of Law and has learned since in practice) to advancing the cause of IAC