Alameda County residents are lucky to have a CCA graduate looking out for them. As executive director of the Alameda County Art Commission, Rachel Osajima uses her art school education for the public good. “I was born and raised in Oakland. I really wanted to work in the East Bay and support the arts community,” she says. Now Osajima directly oversees grants, public art, and arts education programs impacting East Bay schools, nonprofit organizations, and communities.

Did you know that the average person, while asleep, unknowingly eats at least four spiders over the course of his or her lifetime? That gruesome statistic is the inspiration for Ignorance Is Bliss, Miriam Wilson's comedic animated short, which made it into the Cannes Film Festival this past May.

In 2003, Steven Utz left his job at a Walnut Creek architecture firm when his wife accepted a teaching position at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. In addition to his design and historic preservation work, Utz began working with local nonprofit organizations. With only one architecture firm in this rural rustbelt community, he realized that "no one was focusing on low-income housing in a town where 51 percent of the families are living on less than $14,000 a year."

Geoffrey Petrizzi enjoys the unusual distinction of seeing his senior thesis project exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Two years after graduating, Petrizzi submitted his project, Aquaticus—an underwater diving scooter—to ID Magazine. His piece won a Design Distinction award in the Concepts category and caught the eye of Joe Rosa, a curator at SFMOMA, who selected it for the exhibition Body Design, on view from November 2002 through March 2003.