Instructors for the 2008 summer degree classes
David Asari
David Asari has over 18 years of design experience ranging from corporate communications, identity, branding, editorial design, annual reports, books, catalogs, and packaging to exhibition design, environmental design, and wayfinding systems.
Asari began his career with renowned designer Gerald Reis, then worked at several San Francisco studios. As a senior designer at Pentagram for 11 years, he has worked with a range of clients, including Design Within Reach, San Francisco Free Clinic, University of Southern California, the Museum of Glass, University of Michigan Business School, Ansel Adams Center for Photography, McGeorge School of Law, and the San José Institute of Contemporary Art. His projects have been recognized in major design competitions and publications, including New York Art Directors Club, AIGA, Critique, Western Art Directors Club, One Club, and Graphis.
He studied printmaking at University of California at Berkeley, earning his BA degree, and continued his studies in graphic design at CCAC.
Yee Jan Bao
Yee Jan Bao has shown at PS1, Long Island City, New York; the New Museum, New York; Stephen Rosenberg Gallery, New York; Trabia Macafee, New York; Betsy Rosenfield, Chicago; and Thomas McCormick, Chicago. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, the Village Voice, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times.
He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Chicago Arts Council.
He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
BA, Grinnell College; MFA, Claremont Graduate School
Hugh Behm–Steinberg
Poet Hugh Behm–Steinberg is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. His books include The House of the Dead and Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books), a book of poetry, as well as several chapbooks.
He has taught at the University of Arizona and Stanford and is a member of the graduate writing faculty at CCA, where he has taught courses in mentored study, narrative, book structure, and creative writing for the last eight years. He also is the editor of Freehand, a new journal devoted to handwritten work, and oversees Red Is Blue, CCA's undergraduate magazine.
BA, John Hopkins University; MFA, University of Arizona
Claudia Bernardi
Claudia Bernardi is an internationally known visual artist who works in the fields of human rights and social justice. She works in installations, sculpture, and printmaking, and collaborates in projects with dance, theatre, and spoken word.
She has worked for over 20 years locally and internationally designing art–in–community projects for political refugees and survivors of torture from Latin America. Most recently she has focused on developing art–in–community projects to be carried out in countries at war or in postwar periods.
She has exhibited her work globally, including Tucson Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Hiroshima Peace Center, Japan; Center for Building Peace, Northern Ireland; University of Haifa, Israel; Center for Latin American Studies at University of California at Berkeley; Carl Gorman Museum at University of California at Davis; Galeria Habana, Cuba; DAH Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia, and Montenegro.
A 2004 recipient of an Honorary Doctorate in fine srts, Doctor Honoris Causa, Bernardi has worked in association with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, exhuming mass graves in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ethiopia.
MA, MFA University of California at Berkeley; MFA, National School of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires; Honorary Doctorate, College of Wooster
Daniel Brownstein
Dr. Daniel Brownstein is a cultural historian of maps and early modern medicine. He previously taught as a visiting lecturer at University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of San Francisco before joining CCA as a senior lecturer. Dr. Brownstein has worked for two years at The History of Cartography project and is currently completing a book on memory and Renaissance visual culture.
BA, University of Chicago; MA, PhD, University of California at Berkeley
Raul Cabra
Raul Cabra is principal of Cabra Diseno, a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary design firm offering an emphasis on community–based and socially engaged work in the fields of health, art, and education.
He lectures frequently on his work for national and international audiences, most recently addressing the IV Congress of AIDS and HIV Prevention in Cuiaba, Brasil, the University of Nuevo Leon Design Conference in Monterey, Mexico. Mr. Cabra is a consultant to the Republic of China on social change through education and sustainability and is a frequent collaborator with local and international artists.
Raul has been teaching about design and social issues for CCA's graduate and undergraduate programs for the past 10 years.
BFA, CCAC
Jessica Calderwood
Jessica Calderwood's work has exhibited throughout the United States and Great Britain in juried and curated shows. She has been an artist–in–residence at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the Mesa Art Center in Arizona. Her installations, sculpture, and jewelry have been featured in Metalsmith, American Craft, and Ornament Magazine.
BFA, Cleveland Institute of Art; MFA, Arizona State University
Michele Carlson
Michele Carlson was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in Seattle, Washington. As a practicing artist and writer, she is interested in the intersections of history and memory, hip hop, pop culture, Asian American Studies, transnational adoption, and racial melancholia.
Carlson has exhibited at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Kearny Street Workshop, and Giant Robot in San Francisco, along with Tinlark Gallery, Junc Gallery, and the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Her work is available for viewing in the Drawing Center's online viewing program in New York. She is represented by the Cerasoli Gallery in Los Angeles.
She completed an MFA in printmaking and an MA in visual & critical studies from California College of the Arts. Before moving to San Francisco she earned her BFA in printmaking and BAs in interdisciplinary visual arts and American History from the University of Washington.
She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
BFA, BAs, University of Washington; MFA, MA, CCA
Josef Chytry
Josef Chytry is an adjunct professor of critical studies at CCA, teaching in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. He is managing editor of Industrial and Corporate Change (Oxford) at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley, and was included in the 2007 edition of Who's Who in America.
Dr. Chytry has recently authored Cytherica: Aesthetic–Political Essays in an Aphrodisian Key (Peter Lang) and coedited Understanding Industrial and Corporate Change (Oxford). He is presently completing a book on polis thought and organizational–management aesthetics.
Dr. Chytry was a postdoctoral Humboldt fellow in philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg and Tuebingen.
BA, George Washington University; MIA, Columbia University; DPhil, University of Oxford
Robert Coogan
Robert Coogan, whose work is exhibited globally, has been a full professor and head of the metals department at the Tennessee Tech's Appalachian Center for Crafts since 1981. He has also taught workshops throughout the United States, Korea, and England.
Mr. Coogan received a Fullbright Fellowship in 1988 to teach in England and has been awarded The Tennessee Artist Craftsman grant for 2008.
BA, Humboldt State University; MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art
Vince Corvo
Vince Corvo is a mathematician whose principal research interests lie on the border of theoretical mathematics and physics, but whose recent system development activities exploit the formal relationships between language, logic, and object structures.
In addition to being a professor at California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, Corvo is cofounder, CTO, and chief architect of Ravenflow, Inc.
He received a BS in mathematics and an MA in philosophy from Stanford University, was a graduate research fellow in mathematics at Princeton University, and holds a PhD in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.
Howard Eige
Howard Eige is an associate professor who teaches European and American art (contemporary and modern). Eige's painterly, idealistic, spiritual paintings explore wild nature and the vastness of the cosmos and his paintings have been exhibited nationally. His work has been purchased by the Oakland Museum. Eige is the consulting editor for Alcove Books that specializes in contemporary art. He is currently researching the contrasts between contemporary art and the old masters.
MFA, University of Colorado
Rodolphe el–Khoury
Rodolphe el–Khoury is an architect, critic, and historian. He is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Toronto. His publications include See Through Ledoux: Architecture, Theatre and the Pursuit of Transparency, Monolithic Architecture, Architecture in Fashion, Shaping the City: Studies in Theory, History and Urban Design. El–Khoury is a partner in Khoury Levit Fong, a design practice that capitalizes on new media and technology to project a rich and sustainably built environment.
El–Khoury's designs demonstrate how he sees the changing relationship between architecture and the senses. In one example, he is producing a scaffold in an urban square that at night props up surfaces for a spectacle of digitally created images. In another he is creating a digitally constructed soundscape that is superimposed on visual imagery at an AIDS memorial. All his case studies are designed to show how emerging trends and technologies play out in building and planning scenarios. Each design addresses different problems and different senses that are involved in building the urban experience.
In addition to these contemporary case studies, el–Khoury is studying the relationship between architecture and the senses in late 18th-century France. He is interested in how and why architects turned to the sensing body as a way to think of and shape the modern city. In his research he compares these shifts to current transformations in sensory and design practice, exploring architecture's myriad opportunities and challenges in today's media–saturated environments.
Christopher Falliers
Christopher Falliers is an adjunct professor in CCA's undergraduate architecture and graduate Architecture Program (MArch).
BA, University of Colorado; MArch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Principal, ULA Design, Berkeley
Thom Faulders
Thom Faulders is the founder of Faulders Architecture, an award–winning architecture and design studio whose work encompasses client–based projects. In Faulders' designs, architecture is not static form or preprogrammed space, but an arena for adaptive and responsive behaviors. This dynamic and open–ended architecture is articulated through, and defined by, constantly changing relationships: between functionality and subjective engagement, between optical and tactile conditions, between a building and its surroundings. Faulders employs and manipulates a diverse range of innovative strategies and emergent technologies: hybrid materials, patterned surfaces, and a complex repetition of elements. The resultant tectonic language facilitates customization and evolving functional needs, while creating spatially and materially animate environments.
Faulders' work is included in the Permanent Architecture and Design Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including Safe: Design Takes on Risk at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2005); the 2003 Biennale: Experimentadesign(Lisbon, Portugal); and Global Tools: Design in the Age of Intensive Care Units, exhibition at the Kunstlerhaus, Vienna in 2001.
Thom has received numerous honors, including an award in the Possible Futures: Bienal Miami + Beach international competition, an Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York, the experimental design award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an award from the American Institute of Architects.
Linda Geary
Linda Geary's 2008 solo and three–person exhibitions include Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery in Portland, Oregon; Barry Sakata Garo Gallery in Sacramento; and HP Garcia Gallery in New York. Her solo exhibition at Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, was reviewed in ArtForum (February 2007), and she was a resident at Art Omi International artists residency in Omi, New York in 2007. In 2006 she had a solo exhibition of works on paper in Otranto, Italy, organized through the Bau Institute, New York, and Otranto, and curated by Lilly Wei, with a catalog essay by Kenneth Baker. Her work also has been featured in Bay Area Now 3 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Mills College, the Oakland Museum, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Geary is the recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in painting, New York, and the Pollock–Krasner Award.
Lynda Grose
Lynda Grose is an adjunct professor in CCA's Fashion Design Program who has been actively engaged in designing and researching socially and environmentally advanced clothing and textiles for the past 13 years. After receiving a fashion design honors degree from Kingston University in London in 1981, Lynda began a career in fashion design.
In 1988 she joined Esprit as a sweater designer and became head designer for Esprit Collection in 1989. Ten years after starting her career, she began to merge her artistic and commercial skills with her concern for the environment. In 1990 she cofounded Esprit's Ecollection division, a five–year research and development project that helped establish pioneering environmental standards for the clothing industry.
Now an independent designer with a focus on sustainability, Lynda works with companies and organizations around the world, including Aid to Artisans, The Sustainable Cotton Project, IKEA, Patagonia, Aveda, Odwalla, Greenpeace, 13–mile Farm, Marketplace India, and USDA. She also has launched a socially responsible children's sweater line, SimpleLife Kids, marketed in the United States.
Lynda is a founding steering committee member for the Organic Trade Associations Organic Fiber Council. Today she teaches sustainable fashion design at CCA and is a guest lecturer at Haas School of Business, Berkeley; Stanford University, Palo Alto; San Francisco State University; Academy of Art University; Central Saint Martins, London; and Royal College of Art, London.
Forrest Hartman
Forrest Hartman is an adjunct professor within CCA's Critical Studies Program.
BA, Knox College; MDiv, University of Chicago; MA, University of California, Berkeley; MS, PhD, University of Michigan
John Sherlock Hersey
John Sherlock Hersey is an adjunct professor in CCA's Illustration Program, and is considered one of the founders of digital illustration.
His clients include Sony, Bandai, Le Monde, Wired, the Times of London, Swatch, the New York Times, Newsweek, and Benetton. John has designed watchfaces for Swatch, an Absolut Vodka ad, pattern designs for Esprit, on-air IDs for Nickelodeon, font designs distributed with Emigre, and various logos including the XM satellite radio logo.
He also wrote and illustrated the children's book binkobink (2002) and his work has been exhibited at SFMOMA. Studied, Art Center College of Design. Principal, John Hersey Illustration, Larkspur.
Studied, Art Center College of Design; principal, John Hersey Illustration, Larkspur
Gray Holland
Gray Holland is an associate professor in CCA's Industrial Desing Program. He's also the principal of Alchemy Labs, and has a wide range of talents that runs from the creative and artistic conceptions of design and digital sculpting for clients' projects to the production of said projects with flawless precision. Throughout his career Holland has taken his inspiration from science and technology, as well as nature and art.
Before founding Alchemy Labs, Gray was a designer with General Motors, where he worked on various production designs, including projects for Chevrolet and Cadillac.
"At Alchemy Labs, we seek meaning in our work, the world around us, and objects of design. When clients come to us and express their needs, we take on their projects knowing patterns and symbols beneath the surface of things are waiting to be discovered and enjoyed. Our skill is in finding a range of possibility for every design—developing form language that embeds a deeper understanding (that can be felt)—in the expression of a product. By first honoring and then transcending aesthetics, we create the authentic experience people are longing for."
BS, Art Center College of Design
Virginia Jardim
Virginia Jardim is a memoirist and documentarian who teaches in CCA's Writing & Literature and Community Arts programs. She has taught English language skills to artists for over 20 years.
She is interested in how individuals use language to create, describe, discuss, and critique art.
BA, College of Wooster; MAT in ESL, School for International Training, Vermont
David Karam
David Karam is usually a programmer; yet sometimes he is a designer, musician, or teacher. His career began in Austin, Texas, where he produced the interactive graphic adventure, To Preserve Quandic, which was distributed by Prickly–Pear software in 1984. After finishing high school in 1987, Mr. Karam moved to San Francisco, where he inadvertently became a desktop publisher.
In 1993 he founded Post Tool Design with partner Gigi Obrecht and began teaching technology to graphic designers at California College of Arts and Crafts. In the following four years, Post Tool's print and interaction design was published in every major graphic design journal worldwide.
By 1997 Mr. Karam's focus was diverted from graphic programming to server–side and database. In the last 10 years his clients have included Apple, Nokia, J. Paul Getty Museum, SFMOMA, Swatch Watch, and The Body Shop.
BFA, CCAC
Andrew Kudless
Andrew Kudless, associate professor of architecture, holds a MA degree in emergent technology and design from the Architectural Association, London, and a MArch from Tulane University. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japan. Mr. Kudless comes to CCA from Ohio State University's Knowlton School of Architecture, where he has been an assistant professor since 2006.
He has exhibited work internationally, including From Diagram to Code, or The Computational Turn of Contemporary Architecture, Maison de L'Architecture de la Ville, Marseille, France, 2007; and Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies, Architecture Biennial Bejing 2006. His work was the subject of a recent article by Michael Weinstock in Praxis, Issue 9.
MA, Architectural Association, London; MArch, Tulane University
Christina La Sala
Christina La Sala is an installation artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. She was an artist in residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts and at The Hermit Foundation in the Czech Republic. she currently divides her exhibition time between gallery work and film and theater design; she is the set and properties designer with TheatreFIRST at Mills College in Oakland, California.
In Philadelphia she was a member and curator of Nexus Foundation for Today's Art and cofounder and curator of Momenta Art Alternatives. La Sala has been a preparator for the Borovsky Gallery in Philadelphia, the Walter, and McBean Gallery at San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), The Mexican Museum, and a variety of private collections. She currently teaches at CCA and City College.
BFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; MFA, SFAI
Christine Lee
bio pending
Mary Little & Peter Wheeler
Mary Little and Peter Wheeler are partners in the design studio bius (see www.designbius.com), originally established in London in 1997 and then relocated to New Haven, Connecticut in 2005. They return to the Bay Area each summer to teach this upholstery design workshop.
Former CCA adjunct professors, each has over 20 years experience in designing and producing unique, high–end furniture for the residential, corporate, and public arts markets. The studio has recently begun to design innovative furniture for production. At lasy year's NeoCon, they launched their award-winning design, Pool, a modular bench system, for Brayton International (part of Steelcase Design Group). The system was awarded a 2007 GOOD DESIGN award by The Chicago Athenaeum, Museum of Architecture and Design, and an Interior Design Best of Year Merit award.
Their furniture can be found in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Vitra Design Museum, Basel; the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris; and the Museo de las Artes Decorativas, Barcelona, among others.
Over the years bius has developed a unique expertise in upholstery derived from contemporary production techniques with an inspirational root in semi-soft artifacts from a breadth of cultures, such as ancient Eastern costume, Medieval European headwear, and contemporary sportswear.
Nathan Lynch
Nathan Lynch, a sculptor and performance artist, has made collaboration and experimentation major components of his practice. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Johansson Projects in Oakland and Southern Exposure in San Francisco. He has had residencies and studios at Tainan National University of the Arts, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.
Lynch has performed at the Lincoln Center, New York, The International Fringe Festival, Edinburgh, Bumpershoot, Seattle, and the Alvin Lucier Festival, University of Virginia. At the University of Southern California Mr. Lynch studied with Ken Price, and later earned an MFA at Mills College with Ron Nagle. He is currently chair of the ceramics department and assistant professor of Graduate Fine Arts Program, CORE, and ceramics at CCA.
BFA, University of Southern California; MFA, Mills College
Michael Mabry
Michael Mabry heads a small graphic design studio that explores brand identity and illustration. He has served on CCA's faculty and guest lectures at many universities and various designer/art directors' organizations throughout the country.
His work has been represented and received awards in several design competitions, including Communication Arts, The American Institute of Graphic Arts, The American Center for Design, Graphis, The New York Art Directors Club, and The San Francisco Society for Communicating Arts.
His work is included in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. Michael's work also was featured in a solo exhibition in Osaka, Japan, and a group exhibition on California Design at the Museo Fortuny in Venice, Italy.
His current clients include Chronicle Books, The Land of Nod, Lucas Films, The Mellon Foundation, Netjets Europe, the New York Times, and The Oakland Museum of California. He has served as the president of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, as well as on the National Board of Trustees. He also is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale.
BFA with honors; University of Utah
Christos Marcopoulos
Christos Marcopoulos earned his BA degree in architecture from The Cooper Union School of Architecture in 1993. From 1995–1999 he was project architect at OMA, working on projects ranging in scale from building to large urban master plans. He also was senior urban designer at SOM, San Francisco.
From 2003 to 2007 he was lecturer and adjunct professor of architecture at CCA in San Francisco. From 2000 to present he has been a partner (together with Carol Moukheiber) in the design practice Studio n–1. The firm has been recognized for a number of its built work, research projects, and competition entries, and has been widely published.
He is the coeditor of Wild Wild Urbanism: Redesigning California, which CCA published. Studio n–1 is currently developing several projects that deal with ambient intelligence and synthetic psychology.
Christos Marcopoulos currently is an assistant professor of architecture at The University of Toronto.
Carol Moukheiber
Carol Moukheiber graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1988 with a degree in environmental design. She also earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from The Cooper Union School of Architecture in 1993.
She has held positions at Bruce Mau Design and SOM, New York. From 2003-07 she was lecturer and adjunct professor of architecture at CCA. From 2000 to present she has been a partner (together with Christos Marcopoulos) in the design practice Studio n–1. The firm has been recognized for a number of its built work, research projects, and competition entries, and has been widely published. Studio n–1 is currently developing several projects dealing with ambient intelligence and synthetic psychology.
Carol is coeditor of CCA's publication Wild Wild Urbanism: Redesigning California and she is currently assistant professor of architecture at The University of Toronto.
BA, Parsons School of Design; BArch, The Cooper Union
Miriam Paeslack
Miriam Paeslack is a visiting professor in the Visual Studies Program. She was the guest editor of Before and After the Wall: German Photography in Discourse and Practice, a special issue of Visual Resources, and author of Creating a Third Space: Contemporary Photographers' Outsider's View of Asian Cities (2006) and Dis–United: Urbane Fotografie im Nachwendedeutschland (2006). She is currently working on a book on photography in post-reunification Germany.
BA, MA, PhD, University of Freiburg, Germany
Mokhtar Paki
Mokhtar Paki served as a graphic designer for a leftist student organization before, during, and after the Islamic revolution in Iran. Since moving to the United States, he has created graphic pieces, caricatures, and illustrations for such local and national institutions and companies as Amnesty International, United Nations, Food Bank, The STOP AIDS Project, The Names Project, Persian Center, University of San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and University of Chicago.
His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in the Bay Area, including CrossConnections at Intersection, San Francisco, and rePresent CrossConnections at Oliver Art Center, 2005. Mokhtar also has published a novel, several short stories, and articles in both Persian and English.
Mokhtar has also published a novel, several short stories, and articles in Persian and English. Additionally, he holds two degrees earned in Iran: Diploma of Drama Directing and Acting, Center of Drama Education, Shiraz, Iran; and a Diploma of Sculptural Art, Shiraz Cultural Center, Iran.
MA, San Francisco State University; MArch, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Emily Pilloton
Emily Pilloton is the founder of Project H Design (www.projecthdesign.com), a charitable organization that supports humanitarian product design initiatives, the managing editor of Inhabitat ( www.inhabitat.com), and a global design nomad.
She earned her BA and MFA degrees in architecture (the latter including interior architecture and designed objects) and has worked as a designer in multiple scales and champions great design as a tool to influence the world and create change for good.
As a design educator she has taught design theory and studios at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Art. Ms. Pilloton has also written about design for GOOD, I.D., Treehugger, and ReadyMade magazines, has lectured about humanitarian design strategies at international conferences and events, and is a co–organizer of the HauteGreen exhibition and program during New York Design Week.
BA, UC Berkeley; MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Keith Plymale
Keith Plymale is an adjunct professor in both the Architecture Program and Masters Program in Architecture. He also is a partner at Volume 21: Office for Architecture in San Francisco. (See www.volume21.com.)
Mariella Poli
Mariella Poli is a photographer and video artist who has exhibited work internationally at such venues as the Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; Studio Barbieri Arte Contemporanea, Venice; Studio La Città, Verona, Italy; Art Cologne; UCCI, Madrid; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; Ava, Capetown, South Africa; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; and SF Camerawork, San Francisco. Most recently, her work was exhibited in the Fine Arts Museum in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Her publications include Mart: Nascita di un museo (Mondadori Electa, 2004), Montecatini (Skira, 2002), Savoy Hotel (Antiga Edizioni), and No People No Joey (Edizione Osiride, 1999).
Since 1994, Ms. Poli has been teaching photography and interdisciplinary classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Studio Art Center International in Florence (an affiliate of Bowling Green State University, Ohio), Saint Mary's College of California, and CCA.
She has also curated and organized several student exhibitions that have been exhibited locally and internationally.
Susan Robinson
Susan Robinson is a fashion designer who in 1994 started her own business, a San Francisco-based boutique, Penelope Starr, that specializes in dresses, coats, and skirts. She has wholesaled her collection to boutiques throughout the United States and Japan.
BA, Washington State University
Marianne Rogoff
Marianne Rogoff's essay, "Alive in Lisbon," appears in Best Women's Travel Writing 2008. Her true story, "Raven," was selected for The Best Travel Writing 2006. Her biography, Silvie's Life, has been adopted for ethics courses, optioned for movies, and translated in 2006 by Gradiva, Lisbon.
She has published numerous stories, essays, and book reviews. She also has taught at San Francisco State University, New College, Book Passage, and College of Marin.
BA, Rutgers University; MA, San Francisco State University
Michael S. Schneider
Michael S. Schneider has been teaching at CCA since 2001. He is the author of A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe (HarperCollins), five Constructing the Universe workbooks, and numerous articles concerning the appearance of mathematics in nature and in human arts, crafts, and architecture worldwide.
He has given numerous lectures and workshops on the aforementioned subjects and has taught desktop publishing and other applications at MTV and the United Nations.
In 1993 Mr. Schneider designed the geometry that harmonizes the statues on the south side of the Portal of Paradise (central entrance) to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.
BS, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; Med, University of Florida
Jovi Schnell
Jovi Schnell creates installations, paintings, and mixed-media collaged works on paper and wood. Her work has been widely exhibited in such venues as the Stedelijk Bureau Museum (Amsterdam); the Brooklyn Museum, The Drawing Center, the Williams College Museum, PS1, the Derek Eller Gallery (New York); and The Luggage Store Gallery and Gregory Lind Gallery (San Francisco).
Schnell's work is represented by the Gregory Lind Gallery (San Francisco), and has been reviewed in the New York Times, Flash Art, Art in America, the New Yorker, and Art on Paper and has been featured in various publications, including Interview magazine, Beautiful Decay, Juxtapoz, and New American Painting.
Schnell teaches at The San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and UC Berkeley. She also attended a two-year fellowship at De Ateliers, Amsterdam.
BFA, San Francisco Art Institute; studied, de Ateliers, Amsterdam
Matt Shears
Matt Shears' recent poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Notre Dame Review, BlazeVox, Alice Blue Review, and Cutbank. He is currently at work on a mixed-genre piece titled, The-Odicy.
BA, Miami University of Ohio; MFA, University of Iowa; PhD, University of Nevada
K. A. Sheehan
K. A. Sheehan has shown her mixed-media work on paper nationally and internationally. Her work can currently be seen at the Berkeley Civic Center.
She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center as a recipient of the Buley Full Fellowship Award, the Jentel Artist Residency program, the Ucross Foundation, and is currently an artist in residence at the Kala Institute. Sheehan is an instructor at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, City College of San Francisco, and College of Marin in Kentfield, California.
BFA, San Francisco Art Institute; MFA, Arizona State University
Kern Toy
Kern Toy, a native San Franciscan and principal of Kern Toy, has over 20 years experience in the design industry. After testing the waters in New York for several years, he returned to his roots, where he has worked locally with many well-known design firms on a long-term basis, including EnterpriseIG, Primo Angeli, Inc., Pentagram, and Alterpop.
Kern was previously an art director at Autodesk, Inc., the makers of AutoCAD. A successful, talented, multi-disciplined designer, he is noted amongst his peers for technical genius. His work has been featured in Print magazine and IDN, a Japanese design journal.
MFA, CCAC
Ignacio Valero
Ignacio Valero is a current associate professor of Humanities and Sciences at CCA. He has also taught at the University of Madrid, University of the Andes, and Xavier University of Columbia.
Ignacio was formerly with the International Center for Environmental Education, CIFCA, and the United Nations environment and development programs UNEP and UNDP. He was a senior associate with the Colombian Science Foundation, deputy director of Colombia's Environmental Protection Agency, and a member of the presidential advisory council for the writing of the new Colombian constitution.
Ignacio's current interests include the political economy of the image, consumption, desire, and the society of the spectacle; environment, globalization, and the commons; and the aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of "archaic modernity" in science fiction, anime, gender and sexual difference, mass media, and sociopolitical development. He is also interested in understanding practices leading to critical and creative pedagogies, and he is working on a poetry manuscript.
BS, Southwest Missouri State University; MAT, University of Florida; PhD, University of California at Berkeley
Rick Valicenti
Rick Valicenti is the founder and design director of Thirst/Chicago, a communications design firm devoted to art, function, and real human presence. A monograph on the Thirst work, Emotion as Promotion, was published by Monacelli Press in 2004.
A member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale), Valicenti was awarded the 2004 AIGA Chicago Chapter Fellow. In 2006 he received the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA) Medal, the highest honor in the graphic design profession, for his sustained contribution to design excellence and development of the profession.
Valicenti's work is in The Cooper–Hewitt National Design Museum's permanent collection, and was included in its 2006 Triennial, Design Life Now. His clients include the leaders of Chicago's design and cultural community.
Valicenti provides inspiration to his colleagues and mentorship to a generation of students. For the past decade he has lent his time and energies to college and high school students, in the form of personal critiques and workshops that address the design industry.
Sandra Vivanco
Sandra Vivanco is a CCA associate professor who has taught across North America. Her professional activities have included projects in Japan, Peru, Portugal, Mexico, and Italy. She has worked in Portugal for Alvaro Siza, and in New York for Kolatan / Mac Donald Studio and Lynne Breslin.
Her primary field of research is modern Latin American architecture, specifically the postwar condition in Brazil. Since 2004 she has led PeruStudio, an urban research and design build workshop. She also has authored several articles on Latin American 20th-century architecture, specifically the postwar condition in Brazil, including chapters in Transculturation, Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America, and Baroque New Worlds.
As a 2003 Fulbright Scholar, she explored the role of gender in Peruvian modernity and taught in the graduate architecture school at the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria in Lima.
Sandra's San Francisco–based firm, A+D: Architecture+Design, is characterized by its constant investigation of the inhabitation of modern cities. A+D is dedicated to promoting conscientious living through designs that heighten user awareness of tectonic, environmental, and spatial qualities. The work of A+D has been featured on HGTV's Before & After; other television and radio programs; a number of magazines and journals, including Domus, Custom Home, Sunset, San Francisco Chronicle, Dwell, San Francisco, and Small Firms, Great Projects; and two recent books: San Francisco Modern Homes and San Francisco: A Guide to Recent Architecture.
BA, University of California at Berkeley; MArch, Columbia University
Peter Wheeler
See Mary Little
Cooley Windsor
Cooley Windsor currently teaches in CCA's MFA Writing Program. He is a writer whose work has been featured in the Indiana Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fourteen Hills, and Eleven Eleven. His fiction collection VISIT ME IN CALIFORNIA is forthcoming by Northwestern University Press.
Mr. Windsor received an Ernest Hemingway and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
BA, University of New Orleans; MFA, Indiana University
Gene Yang
Gene Yang began drawing comic books in the fifth grade. In 1997 he received the Xeric Grant, a prestigious comics industry grant, for Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks, his first comics work as an adult. He has since written and drawn a number of titles, including Duncan's Kingdom (with art by Derek Kirk Kim) and The Rosary Comic Book.
His most recent work, American Born Chinese, is the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award. It is also the first graphic novel to win the American Library Association's Michael L. Printz Award.
Bijan Yashar
Bijan Yashar was born in Tehran, Iran, and has been living in California since 1979 when he moved with his family at age 10. In addition to pursuing fine art photography and video work, he is a freelance video editor and a digital media consultant. Currently, Mr. Yashar is a lecturer at CCA and also teaches digital photography and digital imaging at Berkeley City College, Las Positas College, and UC Berkeley's Academic Talent Development Program.
Bijan earned his MFA in new genres and has a MA in educational psychology. For the fall semesters of 2005 and 2006, he was a visiting artist at Saint Mary's College.
MFA, San Francisco Art Institute; MA, University of California at Berkeley