California College of the Arts welcomes 10 new chairs across the college
The new chairs will lead various departments within CCA’s Architecture, Design, Fine Arts, and Humanities & Sciences divisions.
San Francisco, CA—August 23, 2023—The California College of the Arts (CCA) is delighted to welcome 10 new chairs to the college, including both new hires and current professors and faculty. Bringing their passion and expertise in each of their respective areas to the classroom, these individuals will provide CCA students with innovative and rich learning experiences.
“We are extremely excited to welcome this group of talented individuals into their new roles. Many students from around the world come to CCA due to the high caliber, creative professors, and we can’t wait to see how these leaders will continue to shape the curriculum and interdisciplinary learning environment of the college in each of their departments.”
New Architecture Chairs
Architecture at CCA is an arena for the free and open exchange of ideas about the future—of our buildings, cities, and planet—and a laboratory where these ideas are tested through speculative architectural research.
Irene Cheng
Graduate Architecture Chair
Irene Cheng is an architectural historian, critic, and educator. Her research explores the entanglements of architecture, culture, politics, race, and environmental concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). She is also co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (The Monacelli Press, 2004).
Cheng is a founding principal of Cheng+Snyder, a multidisciplinary design practice that seeks to instigate critical debates about architecture, politics, and the city, and the co-director of the History Theory Experiments research lab at CCA.
Margaux Schindler
Interior Design Chair
Chair Margaux Schindler is a designer, researcher, and educator whose work focuses on flexible modular building systems, sustainable practices, and innovation in material fabrication. Margaux is a founding partner of SIZL Studio, an interdisciplinary practice specializing in spatial explorations in Architecture, Landscape, Interior Design and Objects. Margaux is interested in developing dynamic strategies for living and exploring multifaceted projects at varied scales with a focus on adaptation, temporality and the interior.
Alex Schofield
Associate Graduate Architecture Chair
Associate Chair Alex Schofield is an Oakland-based designer and the director of Objects and Ideograms, a design workshop focusing on emerging technologies and new material applications deployed in service of a smarter, more ecologically conscious, built environment. He completed his M.Arch at University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Mario Ciampi Art in Architecture Award for his parafictional exploration of an architecture built from coffee grounds. Alex worked as a researcher at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design on the development of the printFARM (Print Facility for Architecture, Research, and Materials) as well as with the innovative materials and technology-based design firm Emerging Objects. He has completed residencies at both Autodesk Pier 9 and Workshop Residence in San Francisco, and has lectured about and exhibited his work widely. Alex is a co-director of the Architectural Ecologies Lab at CCA.
New Design Chairs
CCA design students combine creative risk-taking and the rigorous pursuit of craft and ideas to envision alternative futures and deliver inspired solutions across a wide range of media and industries.
E Roon Kang
Chair of Undergraduate Graphic Design
Chair E Roon Kang is a designer with interest in studying everyday systems and their efficiency. His independent research and design studio, Math Practice, has a long history of working with a wide-range of academic, cultural, and technology-oriented organizations. His work has been selected as an inaugural project of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab; shown in places including MoMA, Seoul Museum of Art, and Seattle Public Library; and presented as a part of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism and the Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Shujan Bertrand
Chair of Undergraduate Industrial Design
Shu Bertrand is an accomplished industrial designer with over 25 years of experience working in Silicon Valley and Milan, Italy. She has worked at notable companies such as LG Electronics, Steelcase, and Incase, as well as agencies includingAstro Studios and IDEO, before starting her brand, Aplat, almost a decade ago.
As the founder of Aplat, a zero-waste design and manufacturing company based in San Francisco, Shu has created a unique gourmet soft-goods collection that inspires us to slow down and share good food, and care for our beautiful planet. Aplat's mission is to reduce pre-consumer waste by embracing circular design, origami folds, and the golden ratio principles.
In addition to her work with Aplat, Shu is on the Executive Board of the Museum of Craft and Design. She is a member of The Council angel investors, a founding member of The Good Future Design Alliance, and serves as the Jury Chair for the IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Awards) competition, advocating for sustainability across IDSA's programs.
At home, Shu is part of a trilingual-speaking family, conversing in Korean, English, and French. She is a mother of two teenagers preparing for college next year. Shu is excited to be the next Industrial Design Chair at California College of the Arts and is deeply committed to creating education in the circular economy and fostering conscious design entrepreneurs for the future.
Justin Lokitz
MBA in Design Strategy Chair
Chair Justin Lokitz, author of the best-selling books Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation and Business Model Shifts: Six Ways to Create New Value for Customers, is an entrepreneur, strategic advisor, and technologist. He spent more than 20 years working inside large corporate organizations, like Oracle and Autodesk, as well as consulting for similar-sized organizations. What he noticed was that most of these companies had lost their sense of who they created value for—their customers—and in many cases no longer knew how to design for customer needs using the human-centered creative approach that design methods offer. As both an alum and now chair of the DMBA program, Justin uses his understanding of business models, rapid prototyping, and iterative problem-solving to create and deliver value for people, empower students, and foster productive partnerships.
New Fine Arts Chairs
Through self-examination, critique, and dialogue, fine arts students at CCA explore artmaking within a broad context as technically trained creative practitioners who are socially engaged with the world around them.
Josh Faught
Textiles Chair
Josh Faught’s practice combines textiles, pop cultural detritus, and archival materials to address the relationships between language, community, and constructions of identity. His work has recently appeared in exhibitions at The Wattis Center for Contemporary Art, Kendall Koppe Gallery, the Moody Center for the Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the New Museum, Sadie Coles HQ, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Faught’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America, among other journals and publications. Faught is the recipient of the 2009 Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award, the 2011 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, the 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award (SECA), the 2016 Artadia Award, the 2016 Eureka Award from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2022.
Anthea Black
Printmedia Chair
Anthea Black is a Canadian artist based in Toronto and the Bay Area. Her studio practice addresses queer and trans archives, collaboration, materiality, and moves between representation, experience and abstraction. Black’s artist-publishing work includes The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism newspaper and HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education, a queer and trans pedagogy project that took form as a collaborative letterpress book, and Reprinting the UNESCO Status of the Artist Archive 1980-2020. As a curator, Black's exhibitions include SUPER STRING (2005), No Place: Queer Geographies on Screen (2012-2016), Pleasure Craft (2016), and The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artist Book touring through 2024. Black is an Associate Professor of Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.
New Humanities & Sciences Chairs
Humanities and Sciences trains students to become critical thinkers and ethical citizens who expertly observe and participate in the production of writing and visual culture.
Faith Adiele
Writing and Literature Chair
Chair Faith Adiele is a travel writer, memoirist, essayist, editor, critic, and multimodal storyteller whose practice engages race, identity, memory and home. Informed by her Nigerian/Nordic/American identity, her literary activism includes testifying about the Nigerian civil war at documenta 14, hosting African Book Club at the Museum of the African Diaspora, starting the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color, and being a founding member of the Afro-Nordic Feminist Consortium. Her work is widely taught in universities and written about in such publications as Condé Nast Traveler, Paste Magazine, LitHub, Book Riot, Bitch Magazine, and the full-length study, Lifting As They Climb: Profiles of Black Women Buddhists.
Việt Lê
Visual and Critical Studies Chair
Chair Việt Lê is a queer, disabled academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past two decades centers on sexualities and spiritualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional, cross-ethnic coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements (Duke University Press, 2021), which received the 2023 Association of Asian American Studies’ Outstanding Achievement book award for Media, Performance, and Visual Studies. The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with artist | theorist Latipa (2nd edition, Candor Arts + Memory and Resistance Laboratory + Sming Sming Books). A 2022-24 Headlands Bay Area Arts Fellow and ‘22 Stanford CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow, he has also received fellowships from the Teiger Foundation, Fulbright-Hays (Việt Nam), Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Italy), Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France).
Lê has presented their work at Bangkok Art & Cultural Center, Rio Gay Film Festival, Shanghai Biennale, the Barbican, among other venues. Lê curated Charlie Don’t Surf!, Centre A, Vancouver, 2005; trấnsmutation, / (Slash), San Francisco, 2023; and co curated transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix (with Yong Soon Min: ARKO, Seoul; Galerie Quynh, Sài Gòn; UC Irvine Gallery; YBCA, SF, 2008-09) and the 2012 Kuandu Biennale (Taipei). A board member of Art Matters, Lê has taught at UC Irvine, University of Southern California, Stanford, and Ca' Foscari University of Venice.
About California College of the Arts
Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) educates students to shape culture and society through the practice and critical study of art, architecture, design, and writing. Benefitting from its San Francisco Bay Area location, the college prepares students for lifelong creative work by cultivating innovation, community engagement, and social and environmental responsibility.
CCA offers a rich curriculum of 22 undergraduate and 10 graduate programs in art, design, architecture, and writing taught by a faculty of expert practitioners. Attracting promising students from across the nation and around the world, CCA is among the 25 most diverse colleges in the U.S. Last year, U.S. News & World Report ranked CCA as one of the top 10 graduate schools for fine arts in the country.
Graduates are highly sought after by companies such as Pixar/Disney, Apple, Intel, Meta, Gensler, Google, IDEO, Autodesk, Mattel, and Nike, and many have launched their own successful businesses. Alumni and faculty are often recognized with the highest honors in their fields, including Academy Awards, AIGA Medals, Fulbright Scholarships, Guggenheim Fellowships, MacArthur Fellowships, National Medal of Arts, and the Rome Prize, among others.
CCA is creating a new, expanded college campus at its current site in San Francisco, spearheaded by the architectural firm Studio Gang. The new campus design will be a model of sustainable construction and practice; will unite the college’s programs in art, crafts, design, architecture, and writing in one location to create new adjacencies and interactions; and will provide more student housing than ever before.