CCA Community Arts Program Expands with Three New Ranked Faculty Positions
San Francisco, January 29, 2008
CCA has expanded its undergraduate Community Arts Program as of the spring 2008 semester with three new ranked faculty positions. The artist Claudia Bernardi, who has taught at CCA for several years, has been promoted to one; the other two are new additions to the faculty: the artists John Jota Leaños and Sanjit Sethi. Sethi is also the new program chair.
CCA has been offering the BFA degree in Community Arts since fall 2005. It is an interdisciplinary program that draws on the rich resources of CCA's Center for Art and Public Life, focusing on community-based arts practice and theory, service learning, civic engagement, and diversity issues.
"The Community Arts Program challenges students to be active participants in society by exploring and practicing the integration of art and social change," says Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, executive director of the Center for Art and Public Life. "All three of these new faculty members are making unique bodies of work that exemplify, in different ways, what community arts practice is all about. They will be a great influence on students in the program, and we are thrilled to have them at CCA."
About Claudia Bernardi
Claudia Bernardi works in the fields of human rights and social justice through installation, sculpture, and printmaking. She also engages in collaborative projects that incorporate dance, theater, and spoken word. She has been a community artist for more than 20 years, and her projects on political refugees and survivors of torture in Latin America have been exhibited internationally. Recently she has been focusing on countries that are at war or
recovering from war. Some of her best-known work resulted from her association with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, exhuming mass graves in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ethiopia.
In 2004 Bernardi received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the College of Wooster. Her work has been exhibited at the Tucson Museum of Art; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; the Hiroshima Peace Center, Japan; the Centre for Peace Building, Donegal, Northern Ireland; the University of Haifa, Israel; the Center for Latin American Studies, University of California at Berkeley; the C. N. Gorman Museum, University of California at Davis; Galería Habana, Havana; and DAH Gallery, Belgrade and Montenegro, Serbia.
About John Jota Leaños
John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner who utilizes multiple media and what he calls "strategic revealing, tactical disruption, and symbolic wagon burning." His practice encompasses diverse cultural arenas, new media, public art, installation, and performance, focusing on the convergence of memory and decolonization. His work has appeared at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has received a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, and he has been an artist in residence at the Center for Chicano Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara (2005), the Center for Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University (2003), and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito (2007).
About Sanjit Sethi
Born in Rochester, New York, Sanjit Sethi received a BFA in 1994 from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and an MFA in 1998 from the University of Georgia. In 2002 he received an MS in advanced visual studies from MIT's visual arts program for a body of work related to ambulation and identity. His artworks address issues of nomadism, labor, memory, and movement in the urban sphere.
Sethi recently finished the Wheel Project, a two-year community-arts endeavor in Toronto, and a Fulbright fellowship in India with the interdisciplinary Building Nomads Project. His current works include the collaborative project Urban Defibrillation and the Gypsy Bridge Project, both of which involve disparate academic, social, and geographic communities.
Sanjit Sethi
John Jota Leaños
Claudia Bernardi
Press Contacts
Kim Lessard
415.703.9547
klessard@cca.edu
Brenda Tucker
415.703.9548
btucker@cca.edu