Director, Curatorial Research Bureau; Chair, Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice, California College of the Arts

Gwen Allen is Professor of Art History at San Francisco State University, where she specializes in contemporary art, criticism, and visual culture. She has written extensively about art and design for publications including Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, ARTMargins, Mousse, Art in America, Art Papers, caa.reviews and East of Bourneo. She is the author of Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press, 2011), and edited the volume The Magazine in the Documents of Contemporary Art Series (MIT Press and the Whitechapel Gallery, 2016).

Giorgio Angelini came to film from a multifaceted career in the creative arts. After touring with bands like The Rosebuds and Bishop Allen, Angelini enrolled in Rice University’s Masters of Architecture Program. Following graduate school, he worked with the architecture firm Schaum Shieh Architects where he designed a wide array of projects, from an exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale to the White Oak Music Hall in Houston, Texas, which received an AIA design award in 2017. Now focused on filmmaking, Angelini launched a production company called Section Perspective Films, the name a nod to his practice operating at the intersection of architecture and film. He served as executive producer for the feature film My Friend Dahmer and directed the documentary-short My Death is Pending…Because. Angelini is currently in production with animator Arthur Jones for a feature documentary about Pepe the Frog, memetics, and the rise of far-right politics in America.

Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2009

Since 1995, Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol work collaboratively as Bik Van der Pol. Working as a collective for them is a conscious political and artistic choice; an art practice does not develop in a vacuum, but manifests itself both in the framework of the art world as well as in the socio-political milieu of contemporary society. Moving away from the studio as the place of production, they took the artistic workplace itself -practice- as the format of research and production. Setting up the conditions for encounter, they developed a process of working that calls for continuous reconfigurations of places, histories and publics, to question, articulate and understand how to produce a public sphere and space for speculation and imagination, where ‘publicness’ is not only defined but also created.

Curatorial Project Manager, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; MA Curatorial Practice, 2020

Rosa Barba is an artist with a particular interest in film and the ways it articulates space. Taking a conceptual approach to filmmaking, questions of composition, physicality of form, and plasticity play an important role in the perception of her work. She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information, and documents, taking them out of the context in which they are normally seen and reshaping and representing them anew. Barba is based in Berlin.

Ute Meta Bauer is the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore. Previously, she was Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, where she also served as Founding Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. As a curator, she is connecting contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats. She was co-curator of Documenta11 and co-curated the US Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale featuring eminent artist Joan Jonas.

Co-founder and co-owner of Sugar Hill Creamery, New York, NY; MA Curatorial Practice, 2008

Dena Beard is Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco. She received her MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Dena has commissioned projects with Lutz Bacher, Ellen Fullman, Dora García, Jacqueline Gordon, Anna Halprin, Constance Hockaday, Fritzia Irízar, Norma Jeane, Annea Lockwood, Barry McGee, Brontez Purnell, Xara Thustra, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Dore Bowen explores the relationship between photography, politics, and human experience to write alternative histories of contemporary art. Her book Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters, with Constance M. Lewallen, is forthcoming from University of California Press. Other publications include “Une Belle Banalité: Dan Graham” in Culture et Musées (forthcoming); “On the Site of Her Own Exclusion: Strategizing Queer Feminist Art History” in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories; “This Bridge Called Imagination: On Reading the Arab Image Foundation” in Invisible Culture; and “Imagine There’s No Image (It’s Easy If You Try): Appropriation in the Age of Digital Reproduction” in The Companion to Art History Since 1945. She has received fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Centre Allemand d’histoire de l’art, The Clark Art Institute, the Camargo Foundation, and the Getty Research Library. She is currently Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at San José State University.

Julia Born lives and works in Zurich. Since completing her studies at Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2000, she has worked on various projects between Switzerland, Amsterdam and Berlin. Her practice focuses on editorial design for a variety of cultural clients, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kunsthalle Basel, the ICA Miami, the Guggenheim Museum New York, and documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. Her work, developed in close dialogue with institutions, curators and artists, includes books, magazines, exhibition design, identities and more. Alongside commissioned work, Born has continuously collaborated on investigative projects with other designers and artists, including photographer Uta Eisenreich, fashion designer JOFF, and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis. These projects revolve around questions of language and representation. Born teaches graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Among her numerous prizes, she received the Jan Tschichold Award in 2011, awarded by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.

PhD Candidate, History of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2008

Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and anthropologist of science. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Medicine & the Muse Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine where she's busy helping physicians tell better stories--for themselves and their patients. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications. Her last book, Animal Madness (Simon & Schuster 2015) was a NYT bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from MIT, is a Senior TED Fellow and a Contributing Writer for Pop Up Magazine, a live magazine the New York Times has called a “Sensation.” Her work and collaborations with musicians and artists have been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera. She's taught popular interdisciplinary courses at Stanford School of Medicine, Harvard, MIT, Smith College and elsewhere and is passionate about working with musicians, physicians, scientists, and artists.

Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; MA Curatorial Practice, 2012

Leandra is based in Brooklyn. She received a Master of Architecture from the University of Kansas with a concentration in Urban Design. From 2010 to 2014, she served as the founding Director of Front/Space, a storefront apartment in Kansas City that provides the community access to non-commercial exhibitions, installations, readings, screenings, concerts, forums, workshops, research and publishing projects. Leandra works as an Archivist at The Lebbeus Woods Archive in New York City and as an architectural designer and project manager at Overhead NYC. She is pursuing dual studies in Curatorial Practice and the Masters of Advanced Architecture Design program.

Emmet Byrne is Design Director and Associate Curator of Design at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He provides creative leadership and strategic direction for the Walker in all areas of visual communication, branding, and publishing, while overseeing the award-winning in-house design studio. The exhibition Designs for Different Futures—a show about how design helps complicate and create multiple futures which he co-curated—recently opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was one of the founders of the short-lived design magazine Task Newsletter in 2009 and is the creator of the Walker’s Intangibles platform—a product line of objects with no physical form. His work has been recognized by the NY Times, Wired Magazine, Grafik, Creative Review, among many others; featured in exhibitions such as the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial and the 27th Brno Biennial; and his book design has twice won the Core77 award for Visual Communication. He is the editor of the Walker’s impulsive design blog, The Gradient.

Director of Public Life, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Michele Carlson is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is Executive Director at Art Practical, an arts publishing organization based in San Francisco, and serves as President of SoMArts Cultural Center. Michele is Associate Professor in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

Deena Chalabi is an independent curator and writer. She is the former Barbara and Stephan Vermut Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As co-curator, with Dominic Willsdon of Public Knowledge, the multi-year partnership between SFMOMA and the San Francisco Public Library supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, she worked with artists, library staff and multiple communities to develop collaborative projects that explored the changing Bay Area and the impact of art and ideas in public life today.

Yann Chateigné is a writer, curator, and professor at the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD–Genève). He previously has served as dean of Visual Arts at HEAD–Genève and chief curator at CAPC in Bordeaux. Previous projects include Bringing Something Back, Bergen Kunsthall (2018), Seismology, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013) and IAO. Psychedelic Explorations in France, 1968–∞, CAPC (2008). His writings appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Mousse and Spike. He coedited The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict (Sternberg Press, 2016).

Executive Director, Coleman Center for the Arts, York, AL; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Communications and Media Editor, Blum & Poe; MA Curatorial Practice, 2020

Brian Conley is an artist. He co-founded Cabinet magazine with Sina Najafi, and has served as Educational and Curatorial Adviser to Sada (Echo) for Contemporary Iraqi Art. He was a visiting artist at the American University in Cairo in 2014, and at Spring Sessions in Amman, Jordan, in 2017. Since 2006, he has been coordinator of the MENA working group for students and faculty from the Middle East and North Africa at the California College of the Arts. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota, and teaches in the Graduate Fine Arts and Sculpture Programs at CCA.

Director of Education and Programs, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Vice President, Color Design, Nike, Portland, OR; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Allan deSouza’s cross-media works restage colonial-era material legacies through counter-strategies of humor, fiction, and (mis)translation. A recent project, Through the Black Country… (2017), transposes Henry Stanley’s 1870s expedition journals to England during the 2016 Brexit vote, and is accompanied by expedition maps, photographs, and a base camp. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Krannert Museum, IL; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. deSouza’s book, How Art Can Be Thought (Duke, 2018), examines art pedagogy, and proposes decolonizing artistic and pedagogical practices that can form new attachments within the contemporary world. The book provides an extensive analytical glossary of some of the most common terms used to discuss art, focusing on their current usage while considering how those terms may be adapted to new artistic and social challenges. deSouza is represented by Talwar Gallery, NY and New Delhi, and is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley.

Sara Dean is an architect and design strategist in the Bay Area. She is Assistant Professor and Assistant Chair in graduate design at California College of the Arts, and Chief Designer at Modern Empathy. Her work considers the implications of emerging digital technologies on public engagement and equity. Focused on civic and environmental adaptability and emergency, this works spans spatial and digital media, with a commitment to open-access data and crowd-production. 

International Director, KADIST, Paris, San Francisco; MA Curatorial Practice, 2007

Founder and Director, Gibbous Creative, Santa Fe, New Mexico; MA Curatorial Practice, 2007

Artist and Museum Liaison, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Elena Filipovic is director and curator of Kunsthalle Basel. She previously served as senior curator at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels from 2009—2014 and in 2008 co-curated When Things Cast No Shadow, the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, with Adam Szymczyk. She has curated over fifty solo and group exhibitions with emerging and established artists alike. She has edited a number of anthologies on exhibition histories, including The Artist as Curator: An Anthology (Mousse Publications, 2017), and The Biennial Reader: Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Hatje Cantz, 2010), co-edited with Marieke van Hal and Solveig Øvstebø. She is author of David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale (Afterall Books, 2017) and The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2016).

Director, Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany; MA Curatorial Practice, 2009

Director and Curator, Ross Art Museum, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH; MA Curatorial Practice, 2011

David Evans Frantz is Associate Curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum. From 2011 to 2018 he was the curator at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. His curatorial projects examine alternative art movements, queer politics and culture, historical erasure, and archival practices in contemporary art. At ONE he founded a visual arts program that presented historical exhibitions and artist commissions responding to ONE’s collections. In 2017 he co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., a collaboration between ONE Archives and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Axis Mundo is traveling to multiple venues in the United States between 2018 and 2020 and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) for the exhibition catalogue.

Head of Visitor Services, MOCAshop Manager, Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson; Collections Assistant, Tucson Museum of Art; MA Curatorial Practice, 2017

Simon Fujiwara has shaped a complex and rich practice that interweaves performance, film, sculpture, and text into highly immersive environmental installations exploring the inherent contradictions in meaning and interpretation of image and representation. Often bringing personal experiences (both real and imagined) into contact with broader historical, social, and political topics, his expansive practice examines the influence marketing, advertising, social media, and other communication mechanisms have on the construction of personal identity. Fujiwara is based in Berlin and represented by Esther Schipper, Berlin.

FounderOwner, Head Over Heels Gymnastics and Circus SF; Director/Owner Mega Aerials Entertainment; Producer, North Beach Cabaret; MA Curatorial Practice, 2014

Independent Curator, Project Manager at l'Observatoire de l'Espace, Paris, FR; MA Curatorial Practice, 2014 

Independent Curator, Exhibition Manager at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA, and Chief Curator of the Soundwave ((8)) Biennial, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2015

Senior Manager, Transportation Planning (Arts & Design), Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro)

Katherine is a Toronto-based writer and curator currently living and working in the Bay Area. Her research interests include feminism and technology, diaspora and identity, and artist biographies. Katherine holds a BA in Art History from the University of Toronto and is pursuing a dual MA in Curatorial Practice and Visual and Critical Studies.

Shaelyn is a San Francisco-based artist and curator focused on socially engaged art. Prior to joining CCA, she oversaw the finances and operations of Creativity Explored, a nonprofit studio and gallery for adult artists with developmental disabilities, where she curated exhibitions for local, national and international art fairs. She previously worked as a nonprofit project manager and HIV/AIDS educator in South Africa. Shaelyn holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Field Studies concentrating on art in developing political societies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is pursuing a MA in Curatorial Practice.

Shannon Harvey is co-founder of Los Angeles-based design studio IN-FO.CO (Inventory Form & Content) and Managing Director of Inventory Press, publishing books on topics in art, architecture, graphic design, and music. With a background in architecture and graphic design, Harvey previously worked in design, editorial, and curatorial roles at Project Projects, Rockwell Group, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and OMA/AMO Rotterdam. 

Chris Hamamoto is a designer, and educator based in Berkeley, CA. He is an assistant professor at California College of the Arts and holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to teaching, he maintains an independent practice–pursuing his interest in how automation and algorithms effects social relationships and aesthetics–a topic he explores through graphic design and software design and production. He has shown work and lectured internationally, and has been recognized by institutions such as Printed Matter, STA Chicago, the Walker Art Center, Hongik University, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Curator, Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, CZ; MA Curatorial Practice, 2017

Shoghig Halajian is a curator and writer who serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA. From 2013 to 2016, she was Assistant Director at LACE, where she curated numerous exhibitions. She has presented projects at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; UKS, Oslo; Le Magasin-Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, among other venues. She is currently a PhD student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego.

Glen Helfand is a writer, critic, and curator. He writes about art, culture, and design for Artforum, Art on Paper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and other publications and exhibition catalogs. He also is the associate editor of CMYK. Glen has organized exhibitions for the de Young Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Mills College Art Museum, and numerous alternative and commercial galleries. He also organizes the visiting artists lecture series at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Constance Hockaday’s work is about creating portals that get people closer to the water and nature, and closer to that feeling of belonging in a place (preferably the place where they live). Hockaday has most often looked to water as a place for hosting social sculptures and immersive experiences. She believes the shoreline is a place where many human and non-human interests collide.

American artist Scott Holmquist has lived and worked in Berlin since 2011. His books, interventions, exhibitions and installations are shown throughout Europe and the United States and have consistently focused upon and interrogated how young males work outside and against their dominant cultures. His recent work Dealer Poses, which examined park drug dealers in Berlin, was presented at Gallerie IG Bildende Kunst in Vienna, Austria, in March 2019. Holmquist has received support from Conservation International; New York State Council on the Arts; the Heinrich Böll Foundation; the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation; Furthermore, Inc; the Kreuzberg Museum, Berlin; and the Provisions Library: the Arts of Social Change at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. 

Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Hood Design Studio is his tripartite practice, working across art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. He is also a professor of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally.

Hood designs and creates urban spaces and objects that are public sculpture. Believing everyone needs beauty in their life, he makes use of everyday objects to create new apertures through which to see the surrounding emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies of urban space. His ideas emerge from years of studying and practicing architecture, landscape architecture, and fine arts, and yet Hood tactfully eschews from differentiating between the three on any one project.

The Studio’s award winning work has been featured in publications including Dwell, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Places Journal, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Walter Hood is also a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award.

Program Director, FOR-SITE Foundation, San Francisco, CA. Curatorial Practice MA, 2010.

Amanda Hunt is Director of Education and Public Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and co-curator of the 2019 Desert X Biennial in Palm Springs. Past appointments include Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Curator at LAXART, Los Angeles, where she helped coordinate the 2012 Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival for the Getty Research Institute, and Made in L.A. 2012, the Hammer Museum’s first Los Angeles biennial. At the Studio Museum, Hunt produced numerous exhibitions, including A Constellation, Black Cowboy, and in 2016 commissioned inHarlem: Kevin Beasley, Simone Leigh, Kori Newkirk, Rudy Shepherd, a public sculpture initiative in partnership with the New York City Parks Department. Hunt was also the first nonregional curator of the Portland Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2014. She obtained an MA in curatorial practice from California College of the Arts.

Director of Education and Public Programs, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2011

Co-director and Curator, Et al. and Et al. etc., San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Director of Contemporary Art and Auctioneer, Bonhams Auctioneers, Los Angeles, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2012

Susie Kantor is the associate curator of visual art at YBCA. She holds an MA in art history with a focus on seventeenth-century Dutch painting from New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, and a BA in art history and political science from Wellesley College. Her curatorial projects include Bay Area Now 8 (co-curated with Lucía Sanromán and Martin Strickland), Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder (2017) (co-curated with Lucía Sanromán), Won Ju Lim: Raycraft Is Dead (2015), Kevin Cooley: Golden Prospects (2015), and Work in Progress: Investigations South of Market (2015), and she served as the coordinating curator for the traveling exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2015). Prior to YBCA, she held positions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and at Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York.

Na Kim is a graphic designer currently based in Seoul and Berlin, as a member of Table Union. She has focused on the visual language on autonomous works as well as various cultural commissioned projects. She was responsible for concept and design of GRAPHIC magazine from 2009 to 2011 and has initiated, since 2015, a series of projects based on her monograph SET. Her solo exhibitions include Black and White (2019), Red, Yellow, Blue (2017), SET (2015), Choice Specimen (2014), Found Abstracts (2011), and Fragile (2006). Kim has served as curator for Brno Biennale, Chaumont Festival, Seoul International Typography Biennale, and Fikra Graphic Design Biennial. She has worked on projects with COS, Hermès, ÅLAND and other commercial clients, as well as shown work at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Victoria & Albert, London, MoMA, Milan Triennale Museum, and Die Neue Sammlung Design Museum, Munich. Na Kim is a member of AGI since 2016.

Administrative Assistant, Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2018

Chloe is an arts organizer and writer based in Oakland, California. She is the Publishing Assistant at Art Practical and the Exhibition and Design Fellow at The Flight Deck. Chloe was previously an Art Educator at the Tucson Museum of Art. She holds a BA in Art and Visual Culture Education with an emphasis in Communities and Museums from the University of Arizona. She is pursuing a dual MA in Curatorial Practice and Visual and Critical Studies.

Curator of Northwest Art, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; MA Curatorial Practice, 2007

Lian Ladia is a curator and organizer.  She is currently working on the research and presentation of Filipino American Bay Area Artist Carlos Villa's works at the Singapore Biennale 2019.  Her curatorial collaborative, Planting Rice was also invited to lead the public program of the exhibition at the National University of Singapore. She is also an organizer at the South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN) working on community planning and engagement projects on social equity and art and culture empowering immigrant families in the SOMA.

Claudia La Rocco is author of the selected writings The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited) and the novel petit cadeau (The Chocolate Factory Theater). Her poetry and prose have been published in 6X6 #34: I Like Softness (Ugly Duckling Presse), Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (Daniel Sack, ed.; Routledge), On Value (Ralph Lemon, ed.; Triple Canopy), among others. She was a critic and reporter for the New York Times from 2005 to 2015.

Contemporary Art Curator, Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima, PE; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Constance Lewallen is adjunct curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive where first she was MATRIX curator and subsequently senior curator who organized many major exhibitions. These include Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (2001), The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) (2001); Everything Matters: Paul Kos, a Retrospective (2003); Ant Farm 1968-1978 (with Steve Seid) (2004); A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (2007; State of Mind: New California Art ca. 1970 (with Karen Moss) (2011). All of these toured nationally and internationally and were accompanied by catalogues. Her most recent exhibition, Mind over Matter, was presented at BAMPFA in 2016. Lewallen is author of 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House and co-author of Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters, both published by UC Press.

Nancy Lim is assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she focuses on postwar and contemporary California art. She is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibitions Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess and California (2019) and the 2019 SECA Art Award, as well as a Deborah Remington survey opening at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in spring 2020. She also contributed to the retrospectives of Bruce Conner (2016–17) and Vija Celmins (2018–19), and has organized collection exhibitions including Between Two Worlds (2017–18) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Art of California (2018). Prior to SFMOMA, she served as Asian Art Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum, and as Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Berlin. She was director of Tensta konsthall from 2011 to 2018, and artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale; director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008–10); and director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005–07). From 2002 to 2004, she was director of Kunstverein München, and in 1998 was co-curator of Manifesta 2. She is professor of artistic research at the Art Academy in Oslo. In 2010, Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press. (Portrait by Bernd Krauss)

Maria Lind is the program’s 2018/19 Curator-in-Residence.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Berlin. She was director of Tensta konsthall from 2011 to 2018, and artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale; director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008–10); and director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005–07). From 2002 to 2004, she was director of Kunstverein München, and in 1998 was co-curator of Manifesta 2. She is professor of artistic research at the Art Academy in Oslo. In 2010, Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press. (Portrait by Bernd Krauss)

Maria Lind is the program’s 2018/19 Curator-in-Residence.

As a curator, educator, and cultural producer, Christina Linden supports social relevancy and creates platforms for underrepresented voices. Her recent shows have addressed feminism, queer culture, performance, social practice, and the interplay of art, the environment, and history/herstory/hxstory. She has curated projects at the Oakland Museum of California, Stanford University, SFMOMA, Kadist, and the Hessel Museum, and has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, SFAI, CSU, and Bard College. Her writing has been published in Art in America, Fillip, and Modern Painters. Linden holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, and a BA in Art History from New York University. She is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at CCA.

Youyou is a curator and artist based in Shanghai. Her curatorial research interests include geopolitics and hermeneutics. She received a BA in Fine Art from Shanghai University where, during her studies, she served as a researcher of display design at the L Frame Studio. She is pursuing a MA in Curatorial Practice.

Director of Programs, Bayview Opera House, San Francisco, Ca; MA Curatorial Practice, 2007

Ted Mann is an independent curator based in the Bay Area. He was the guest curator for Bruce Nauman: Blue and Yellow Corridor at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California Davis, and is the co-curator of a forthcoming survey of Stephen Kaltenbach opening at  the Manetti Shrem in January 2020. He is also consulting associate curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's Panza Collection Initiative (2010-2020).  Mann received his MA and MPhil from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. 

Emily is an arts professional originally from New York. She received a BA from Johns Hopkins University with dual majors in History and English and minors in Museum Studies and Fine Art. Prior to pursuing her MA in Curatorial Practice at CCA, she worked with Sotheby’s in New York, where she worked with a global network of collectors and art institutions. She has also worked with the Jewish Museum and Art in Odd Places, a performance art festival, both in New York City.

Founder and Owner, Soft Opening, London, UK; MA Curatorial Practice, 2013

Director, Leadership Gifts, California College of the Arts

Josiah McElheny is a sculptor who draws from the decorative and functional traditions of glass to craft a new, multifaceted form of contemporary art. Often using narratives inspired by the histories of art, design, and glass as points of departure, McElheny creates objects of exceptional formal sophistication, exquisite craftsmanship, and conceptual rigor. While the beauty of his blown glass objects invite viewers into his installations, the narratives behind each piece encourage thoughtful reflection upon the objects’ significance.

Academic Partnerships Project Manager, California College of the Arts

J. Myers-Szupinska is an art historian, editor and curator whose essays have appeared in Afterall, Art Journal, Artforum, Fillip, Frieze, October, Tate Papers, exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and elsewhere. At CCA Myers teaches contemporary art history, the history of exhibitions, and has advised since 2010 the written and curatorial components of the thesis sequence in Curatorial Practice. Since 2011 Myers has worked with J. Szupinska as part of the critical and curatorial collaboration grupa o.k., producing projects for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland, and Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, Canada, and other institutions. Titled Citizens of Nowhere, Myers' current research focuses on international exhibitions and the globalization of contemporary art discourse in the 1990s, in light of immigration, integrationspolitik, and the politics of online sociability.

Adam Michaels is a designer, editor, and publisher. He is the co-founder of IN-FO.CO (Inventory Form & Content) and publisher of Inventory Press. Previously, he co-founded internationally-renowned design studio Project Projects (2004–2017), recipient of the 2015 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Communication Design. Michaels is co-author of The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback. 

Gallerist, Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, NY; MA Curatorial Practice, 2011

Independent Curator of Research and Institutional Memory, Public Knowledge, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2017

Qianjin Montoya is a San Francisco–based independent curatorial researcher. She holds an MA in curatorial practice from California College of the Arts and a BA in art history from UC Berkeley. She was co-curator and program coordinator of her graduate thesis exhibition, Black Light (2017), which took place at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and involved discussions on cultural institutions, community building, and creative invention among black artists in the United States. Her contributions to YBCA’s Bay Area Now 8 included a timeline and an essay, “Twenty Years of Bay Area: Legacy of the Locals.” She is a 2018/19 Emerging Arts Professionals (EAP) SF/Bay Area Fellow and has held positions at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco and One Grand Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

Viniita (Vee) Moran is an artist, bookseller, and publisher. She is the founder of Owl Cave Books, a San Francisco-based independent bookshop and publisher specializing in international contemporary art, theory, culture, and politics. Established in London in 2008 while she was also Bookshop Manager at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Owl Cave has been based in the Bay Area since 2010. Owl Cave continues through multiple iterations, participating in exhibitions, book fairs, contributing to publications, research groups, and from 2016 until 2018 operating a full time experimental artist-run bookshop in San Francisco’s Mission District.

In his sculptures, photographs, and films, the artist Shahryar Nashat often addresses the representation of the body and the conventions of mediation and presentation. Nashat finds great pleasure in details, and his works—with their near-obsessive methods of framing and cropping—draw the viewer into a world of clandestine forms, artful gestures, and posturing. Nashat is represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, and Rodeo Gallery, London. He is currently based in Los Angeles.

Collection Manager & Americas Assistant Curator, Kadist, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2017

Prior to her 2017 appointment as Dean of Design at California College of the Arts, Helen Maria Nugent held a series of leadership positions at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) since 1997, including chair of the Designed Objects programs; director of the MDes, MFA, and BFA Pathway programs; and director of the First-Year program. She has taught in SAIC’s Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects since 1997, and became full professor in 2010.

Nugent is co-founder of HAELO Design with Ron Kirkpatrick. Haelo is an independent, research-oriented studio that pursues speculative and commercial design projects with a focus on furniture, objects, services, and exhibition design.

Assistant Curator, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; MA Curatorial Practice, 2014

Associate Curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Yomna is a curator and researcher born in Cairo, Egypt. Her research interests include cultural critiques of post-coloniality and globalization as well as societal and political factors that that the construction of identity, including gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality. She is pursuing a dual MA in Curatorial Practice and Visual and Critical Studies.

Designer and Associate Director, Curatorial Research Bureau

Barbara Pollack is an award-winning journalist, art critic, and curator who is one of the world’s leading authorities on contemporary Chinese art. Pollack’s writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, Departures, Art and Auction, and Art in America, among many others. She has also written several groundbreaking monographs on young Chinese artists, including the first published artist profile of Ai Weiwei for ARTnews in 2005. She lectures regularly across the USA and Asia, and was the keynote speaker at 2018’s Art Basel Hong Kong.

Curator, Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany; MA Curatorial Practice, 2009

Renny Pritikin was born in New York and holds a BA from New School College, New York, and an MA in interdisciplinary arts from San Francisco State University. He was codirector, then director, of New Langton Arts in San Francisco from 1979 to 1992; chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1992 to 2004; director of the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at UC Davis from 2004 to 2012; and chief curator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, from 2014 to 2018. Pritikin was a senior adjunct professor in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts from its inception in 2003 until 2015. He is currently working on a memoir and curating two exhibitions for the Contemporary Jewish Museum for 2020.

Daniela Lieja Quintanar is a curator at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and works between Los Angeles and Mexico, emphasizing contemporary art and curatorial practices that explore the politics and social issues of everyday life. She is part of the curatorial team of the MexiCali Biennial 2018–19, and was recently awarded the Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Curator, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Director of Programming, San Francisco Art Book Fair, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2013

Curator, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia; MA Curatorial Practice, 2012

Frances Richard is the author of three books of poems: Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003). She is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005), and editor of Joan Jonas is On Our Mind, a volume of essays on the artist (Wattis Institute, 2017); her book-length study Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics appears in 2019 from the University of California Press. She is associate editor at Places journal, and teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Sarah Rifky is co-founder of Beirut, an art initiative in Cairo, and founder of CIRCA (Cairo International Resource Center for Art). She has served as artistic director of ArteEast in New York (2017–18), co-curator of Jogjakarta Biennale XII (2013), curator of Townhouse (2009–11), and curatorial Agent for dOCUMENTA(13) (2012). She is co-editor of Thresholds 47: Repeat, Positionen: Zeitgenössische Künstler aus der Arabischen Welt and Damascus: Artists, Tourists and Secret Agents. She is author of The Going Insurrection (2012). Rifky is a Ph.D. candidate in History, Theory and Criticism and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Leslie Carol Roberts, BA Michigan, MFA, Iowa, Fulbright Fellow, is an author, journalist, and essayist. Her book Here Is Where I Walk: Episodes from a Life in the Forest (Nevada, 2019), details more than a decade of walks in the Presidio National Park where she resides as well as walks in Tasmania, Italy, Maryland, and elsewhere, offering a set of John D’Agata (About a Mountain) called “absorbing, funny, tragic, and deeply present ruminations.” She is also professor and chair of the MFA Writing program at California College of the Arts.

The Rodina (Tereza and Vit Ruller) is a post-critical design studio with an experimental practice drenched in strategies of performance art, play and subversion. Both in commissioned work and in autonomous practice, they activate and re-imagine a dazzling range of layered meanings across, below and beyond the surface of design. The Rodina invents ways in which experience, knowledge and relations are produced and preserved. In their work, Tereza and Vit often explore the spatial and interactive possibilities of virtual environments as a space for new thoughts and aesthetics that come forward from between culture and technology The studio specialises in video, user experience, installations, and visual identities. This cross-media approach allows examining communication as thousands of small interactions which leads to actions. In 2015, The Rodina researched performativity within graphic design and coined term “performative design” (in the field of visual communication) which is further described in Action to Surface publication.

Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her projects include the exhibition In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury, to open in 2019. In 2017, she co-curated Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute and edited As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History. In 2014, she curated the second Istanbul Design Biennial. Ryan has taught graduate seminars at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Director and Curator, Hunter East Harlem, Hunter College, New York, NY; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Owner and Director, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2007

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is a San Francisco based artist, graphic and landscape designer, and writer. Her work mixes Californian Pop with Swiss Modernism into California Cool. In the 1960s, at The Sea Ranch, she created SUPERGRAPHICS where supersized contentless stripes, arrows, and letterforms fly from one wall to the next to the ceiling to become art people can walk into.

Megan Steinman is an independent curator, writer, and producer with over 20 years of experience in the arts, entertainment and culture industries. She is currently the Director of The Underground Museum in Los Angeles. Megan holds a Master of Public Art Studies from the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Art. She has organized exhibitions, art installations and events at institutions around the world, including Dolby Gallery, Museo Pecci Milano, Sonos Studio Los Angeles, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, District Berlin, ICA Boston, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Megan has written for several artist publications and exhibition catalogs, including Edges of the Experiment by Marie-Josè Jongerius (2014, Fw: Books Amsterdam) and Dance/Draw at ICA Boston (2011, Hatje Cantz).

Associate Director of Public Life, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Elizabeth Thomas is a curator and writer with primary interest in the production of site-responsive artworks across a range of media. Recently Director of Public Engagement for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, she organized the retrospective Body Radical with Anna Halprin and Ana Prvacki’s Detour. She has a range of institutional experience, as Associate Curator at Carnegie Museum of Art and Curatorial Fellow at Walker Art Center, in addition to freelance projects conceived with the Andy Warhol Museum, MassMoCA, University of Michigan Mueum of Art, Powerhouse Arts, Swissnex, and Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture. She has taught in CCA’s Curatorial Practice Program for five years, in addition to serving as a guest speaker at institutions ranging from Stanford University to the New School to Mildred’s Lane. She writes frequently for a range of publications, most recently Paper Monument’s As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now?.

Director and Curator, The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion, Marylhurst University, Marylhurst, OR; MA Curatorial Practice, 2012

Senior Curator, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

Weston Teruya is a Honolulu-born, Oakland-based artist who has exhibited at the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Kearny Street Workshop, San Francisco; Longhouse Projects and the New York City Fire Museum, New York; and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. He has received public art commissions from the San Francisco and Alameda County Arts Commissions. In 2019 Teruya will exhibit at the Mills College Art Museum and have a solo exhibition at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. He has received grants from Artadia, the Asian Cultural Council, Creative Work Fund, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. He has been an artist in residence at Montalvo Arts Center, Ox-Bow, the de Young, Recology, and Kala Art Institute, and will be at A. Farm in Saigon in 2019.

Independent Curator, San Francisco, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2018

Collection & Gallery Management Assistant, KADIST San Francisco; MA Curatorial Practice, 2020

Artistic Director, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA; MA Curatorial Practice, 2010

James Voorhies is a curator and art historian of modern and contemporary art. He is Director of Curatorial Research Bureau, Chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice, and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at California College of the Arts. Prior to CCA, he was Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. His practice operates under the name Bureau for Open Culture, and his book Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form was published by MIT Press in 2017.

Bookshop and Design Coordinator, California College of the Arts

The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; MA Curatorial Practice, 2009

Owner and Director of Central Features Contemporary Art, and Administrative Director of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation, Albuquerque, NM; MA Curatorial Practice, 2007