California College of the Arts (CCA) is pleased to welcome several new full-time faculty members and four new undergraduate program chairs for 2012-13 academic year.

New Program Chairs

Architecture is now headed by Mark Donohue, principal and cofounder of Visible Research Office; his focus is on researching new fabrication techniques and innovative materials.

Longtime faculty member Linda Geary now helms Painting/Drawing; her work has been widely exhibited and collected, and her current projects include a book on the 100 studio visits she made last year while on sabbatical.

Sandrine Lebas has been hired to chair Industrial Design; she worked for several years for Philippe Starck and then joined the San Francisco LUNAR team in 2000, where she has worked with such clients as HP, Adidas, and LeapFrog on a broad range of projects.

Cathrine Veikos is the new chair of Interior Design. She joined CCA's faculty last year after teaching in the Architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design for more than 10 years.

Veikos has also held teaching positions at Illinois Institute of Technology, Tulane University, and Harvard University. She holds an MArch from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and an undergraduate degree in Architecture from Barnard College.

New Full-Time Faculty

Irene Cheng, Assistant Professor, Architecture
Irene Cheng is an architectural historian, designer, and writer. Her current research explores the links between architectural geometry and radical politics in the nineteenth-century United States.

Cheng is a founding partner of Cheng + Snyder, a multidisciplinary design firm, and is the coeditor, with Bernard Tschumi, of The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century.

She holds a BA from Harvard and an MArch from Columbia, where she is completing her PhD.

Patricia G. Lange, Assistant Professor, Critical Studies
Anthropologist Patricia G. Lange studies technical identities, YouTube, new media, and online civic engagement.

She is coauthor of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, which analyzed findings from the MacArthur-funded Digital Youth and Informal Learning study.

Lange's work has been published in a variety of journals, including Anthropology of Work Review; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; Visual Communication; Discourse Studies; Games & Culture; Human Organization; Enculturation; and The Scholar and Feminist Online.

She is currently writing a new book tentatively titled, Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies.

She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan.

Viet Lê, Assistant Professor, Visual Studies
Viet Lê has exhibited his artwork internationally, including the Banff Center (Alberta); Dobaebasca Gallery (Seoul); Java Arts (Phnom Penh); and H Gallery (Bangkok).

He curated Miss Saigon with the Wind (Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica); Charlie Don't Surf! (Centre A, Vancouver); Chains of Love: the Shadows of Empire (Oceanside Museum of Art). He co-curated humor us with Leta Ming and Yong Soon Min (Los Angeles); transPOP: Korea Viet Nam Remix with Yong Soon Min (Seoul, Saigon, San Francisco); and the Kuandu Biennale (Taipei).

Lê received fellowships from Fulbright Hays (Việt Nam), Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Italy), the Center for Khmer Studies (Cambodia), Fine Arts Work Center (US), and Academia Sinica (Taipei).

Mauricio Soto, Assistant Professor, Architecture
Mauricio Soto’s architectural work focuses on building technologies. He received a degree in architecture from Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela and his MArch from University of Michigan.

Most recently Soto served as an assistant professor of architecture at Universität Stuttgart in Germany as well as principal of Studio for Lightweight Design in Stuttgart.

Other New Ranked Faculty

Faith Adiele, Associate Professor, MFA in Writing
Named as one of Marie Claire magazine’s "Five Women to Learn From," Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith (W. W. Norton), the PEN Beyond Margins Winner for Best Memoir; writer/narrator/subject of My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about family, travel, and identity; and coeditor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press).

A graduate of Harvard University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, Adiele has written for such periodicals as Yes!, Essence, and O: The Oprah Magazine, and has appeared on NPR; in Pink Magazine; and on the Tavis Smiley show.

Ed Bell, Assistant Professor, Animation
Animation artist, filmmaker, and designer Ed Bell is a graduate of Cal Arts. He started his career animating and doing scene layout and visual development in Los Angeles.

Bell's television work includes Big City for MTV’s Liquid Television, contributing director on HBO's Good Night Moon & Other Sleepytime Tales, which garnered the 1999–2000 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Children's Program, and directing HBO’s award-winning series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child.

Film credits include work on the animated features Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Bebe’s Kids, and FernGully. Bell was the producing director and writer of The John Henry Story, an HBO and BBC Wales coproduction that was presented at the World Summit on Children's Television and was awarded two Primetime Emmys.

Jacqueline Francis, Associate Professor, Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies
Jacqueline Francis, PhD, is an art historian specializing in U.S. art of the twentieth century and contemporary African Diaspora art.

Her articles and reviews have been published in Radical History Review, American Art, Third Text, and other scholarly journals. Her book, Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press.

Francis is a coeditor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist, an anthology forthcoming from Yale University Press. She serves on the board of directors of the College Art Association, an international organization serving students and professionals working in the visual arts. She has taught at Kenyon College, the University of Michigan, San Francisco State University, and Stanford University.

Greg Lemon, Assistant Professor, Animation
Greg Lemon has been working in the field of gaming and computer graphics for over 15 years, with a résumé that spans film, television, visual effects, and video games. He has helped produce and art direct several independent games for the Apple iOS, and has recently began exploring the creative side of programming, producing art and games with the programming language LUA.

A compulsive dreamer and explorer, Lemon is always researching and exploring new ways to distort, animate, and render the world in ways that challenge the viewer's perception of our unusual and amazing world.

Jeremy Mende, Associate Professor, Graphic Design
Jeremy Mende has been a member of the CCA design faculty since 2001. In that time he has taught widely in the program including courses in experimental typography, advanced visual design, critical theory, mythology, and design history. Most recently he was the 2010-11 Rome Prize winner in Design at the American Academy in Rome.

Mende received his BA in psychology from UCLA and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2000 he founded MendeDesign, a creative practice that balances commercial projects with visual research and public art.

He currently has pieces in several collections including SFMoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Paul Montgomery, Associate Professor, Design
Paul Montgomery began his career designing for Texas Instruments. In 1988 Paul moved to frog design as design director, developing “product stories” for such clients as Eveready, Samsung, and Apple Computer.

Since cofounding Montgomery Pfeifer in 1990, Montgomery continues to lead industrial design, identity design, interaction design, and mechanical design programs for domestic and international clients such as Microsoft, Logitech, Lifescan, and Alcatel.

Montgomery’s work has been recognized internationally through numerous awards and granted over 30 U.S. patents.

He holds a BA from North Carolina State University, School of Design, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Indhira Rojas Sanchez, Assistant Professor, Interaction Design
Indhira Rojas holds a BFA in Communication Design from Parsons The New School for Design and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Recent accomplishments include a summer internship at IDEO, a grant award from CCA Center for Art and Public Life, research contribution to the ACM Creativity and Cognition 2009 Conference, and organization of design-thinking workshops in the Dominican Republic, her home country.

Newly Tenured Faculty

Congratulations to associate professors Kota Ezawa (Film), Lynda Grose (Fashion Design), Tirza Latimer (Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies), and Aimee Phan (Writing and Literature), who were awarded tenure this past year.

All four faculty members are stellar members of the CCA community as well as their respective professional communities. Later this year they will be giving tenure presentations.