50 Notable alumni of
California College of the Arts
Updated:
The California College of the Arts is 1078th in the world, 392nd in North America, and 366th in the United States by aggregated alumni prominence. Below is the list of 50 notable alumni from the California College of the Arts sorted by their wiki pages popularity. The directory includes famous graduates and former students along with research and academic staff.
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Alexandra Grant
- Enrolled in the California College of the Arts
- Studied in 2000
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Alexandra Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text and collaborative group installations based on that process. She is based in Los Angeles.
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Tom Franco
- Occupations
- actortelevision actor
- Biography
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Thomas Andrew Franco is an American actor, artist, and the founder of the Firehouse Art Collective in Berkeley, California. He is the brother of actors James Franco and Dave Franco.
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Chrisann Brennan
- Occupations
- painteressayist
- Biography
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Chrisann Brennan is an American memoirist and painter. She is the author of The Bite in the Apple, an autobiography about her relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They had one child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
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David Choe
- Occupations
- novelistpainterpodcaster
- Biography
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David Choe is an American artist, musician, actor, and former journalist and podcast host from Los Angeles. Choe's work appears in a wide variety of urban culture and entertainment contexts. He has illustrated and written for magazines including Hustler, Ray Gun and Vice. He has an ongoing relationship with the Asian pop culture website, store, and former magazine Giant Robot.
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Mike Mignola
- Occupations
- screenwritercomics artistpencillercomics writernovelist
- Biography
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Michael Mignola is an American comic book writer best known for creating Hellboy for Dark Horse Comics, part of a shared universe of titles including B.P.R.D., Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson, and various spin-offs. He has also created other supernatural and paranormal themed titles for Dark Horse including Baltimore, Joe Golem, and The Amazing Screw-On Head.
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Wayne Wang
- Occupations
- film directorfilm producerscreenwriterdirectorwriter
- Biography
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Wayne Wang is a Hong Kong-American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Considered a pioneer of Asian-American cinema, he was one of the first Chinese-American filmmakers to gain a major foothold in Hollywood. His films, often independently produced, deal with issues of contemporary Asian-American culture and domestic life.
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Steve Purcell
- Occupations
- comics artistvoice actorscreenwritercartoonistfilm director
- Biography
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Steven Ross Purcell is an American cartoonist, animator, game designer and voice actor. He is the creator of the media franchise Sam & Max, for which Purcell received an Eisner Award in 2007. The series has grown to incorporate an animated television series and several video games.
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Dennis Oppenheim
- Occupations
- photographersculptorvideo artistconceptual artistdraftsperson
- Biography
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Dennis Oppenheim was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the nature of art, the making of art and the definition of art: a meta-art that arose when strategies of the Minimalists were expanded to focus on site and context. As well as an aesthetic agenda, the work progressed from perceptions of the physical properties of the gallery to the social and political context, largely taking the form of permanent public sculpture in the last two decades of a highly prolific career, whose diversity could exasperate his critics.
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Maia Kobabe
- Enrolled in the California College of the Arts
- Graduated with Master of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- draftspersonwritercomics artistillustrator
- Biography
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Maia Kobabe is an American cartoonist and author who wrote the memoir Gender Queer.
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Bedri Baykam
- Occupations
- film actorpoliticianpainterfilm director
- Biography
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Bedri Baykam is a Turkish artist.
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Hank Willis Thomas
- Occupations
- photographerconceptual artist
- Biography
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Hank Willis Thomas is an American conceptual artist. Based in Brooklyn, New York, he works primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture.
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Peter Voulkos
- Occupations
- ceramicistpaintersculptorartist
- Biography
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Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
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Todd Hido
- Occupations
- photographerartist
- Biography
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Todd Hido is an American photographer. He has produced 17 books, had his work exhibited widely and included in various public collections. Hido is currently an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
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Makode Linde
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Makode Alexander Joel Linde is a Swedish artist, musician and DJ. He became internationally known for his controversial art piece Painful Cake, which he created in Stockholm in 2012.
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Johanna Drucker
- Enrolled in the California College of the Arts
- In 1973 graduated with Bachelor of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- book artistacademicart historiancuratorhistorian
- Biography
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Johanna Drucker is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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Nathan Oliveira
- Occupations
- draftspersonpaintersculptorprintmaker
- Biography
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Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide. He taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in the early 1950s, when he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland. After serving as a Visiting Artist at several universities, he became a Professor of Studio Art at Stanford University.
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Manuel Neri
- Occupations
- paintersculptor
- Biography
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Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. Over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s, Neri worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.
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Anne Wilson
- Occupations
- installation artistartist
- Biography
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Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art (techniques such as stitching, crocheting, and knitting) to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Billy Al Bengston
- Occupations
- ceramicistpainterlithographersculptor
- Biography
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Billy Al Bengston was an American visual artist and sculptor who lived and worked in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii. Bengston was probably best known for work he created that reflected California's "Kustom" car and motorcycle culture. He pioneered the use of sprayed layers of automobile lacquer in fine art and often used colors that were psychedelic and shapes that were mandala-like. ARTnews referred to Bengston as a "giant of Los Angeles's postwar art scene."
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Dan Brereton
- Occupations
- comics artistcomics colorist
- Biography
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Daniel Alan Brereton is an American writer and illustrator who has produced notable work in the comic book field.
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Roger C. Field
- Occupations
- inventordesignerguitarist
- Biography
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Roger C. Field is an English designer and the inventor of the Foldaxe folding electric guitar, which won the Designers' Choice Award for the United States in 1980. He is also an inventor with over 100 patents, an industrial designer, and a guitarist. He has been written about in Playboy magazine 21 times in 16 countries, in Penthouse magazine four times in Europe, and in Esquire. He is in four different Who's Who books in Europe, including one for the European Union.
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Patrick Lin
- Born in
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United Kingdom - Occupations
- cinematographer
- Biography
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Patrick Lin is a Hong Kong–born cinematographer and layout artist who works for Pixar. He was the director of photography on The Incredibles (2004), Up (2009), Inside Out (2015) and Toy Story 4 (2019).
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Raymond Saunders
- Enrolled in the California College of the Arts
- Graduated with Master of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Raymond Saunders is an American artist known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. Saunders is also recognized for his installation, sculpture, and curatorial work.
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Takeshi Yamada
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Takeshi Yamada is a Japanese-American artist and rogue taxidermist.
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Natalia Anciso
- Occupations
- installation artist
- Biography
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Natalia Anciso is an American Chicana-Tejana contemporary artist and educator. Her artwork focuses primarily on issues involving Identity, especially as it pertains to her experiences growing up along the U.S.-Mexico Border, via visual art and installation art. Her more recent work covers topics related to education, human rights, and social justice, which is informed by her experience as an urban educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a native of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
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Marissa Moss
- Occupations
- writerchildren's writer
- Biography
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Marissa Moss is an American children's book author.
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Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie
- Occupations
- photographervideo artist
- Biography
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Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie is a Navajo Nation photographer, museum director, curator, and professor. She is living in Davis, California. She serves as the director of the Gorman Museum of Native American Art and teaches at University of California, Davis.
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Christopher Simmons
- Occupations
- graphic designer
- Biography
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Christopher Simmons, is a Canadian-born American graphic designer, design leader, writer, and educator. He is based in San Francisco, California.
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Amy Karle
- Occupations
- artistbioartistcontemporary artist
- Biography
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Amy Karle is an American artist, bioartist, and futurist whose work focuses on the relationship between technology and humanity, specifically how technology and biotechnology impact health, humanity, society, evolution, and the future. Karle combines science and technology with art and is known for using living tissue in her work.
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Tony DeLap
- Occupations
- artistsculptorpainter
- Biography
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Tony DeLap was a West Coast artist, known for his abstract sculpture utilizing illusionist techniques and meticulous craftsmanship. As a pioneer of West Coast minimalism and Op Art, DeLap's oeuvre is a testament to his willingness to continuously challenge the viewer's perception of reality.
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Michael Patrick Cronan
- Occupations
- graphic designer
- Biography
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Michael Patrick Cronan was an American graphic designer, brand strategist, adjunct professor, and fine art painter. He was one of the founders of the San Francisco Bay Area postmodern movement in graphic design, that later became known as the "Pacific Wave".
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Gary Ruddell
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Gary Ruddell is an American artist best known for his figurative representational paintings. As well as his illustrations for works of science fiction and fantasy literature. His cover artwork for Dan Simmons's novel Hyperion was nominated for the 1990 Hugo Award for Best Original Artwork.
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Chelsea Martin
- Occupations
- comics artistwriter
- Biography
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Chelsea Martin is an American author and illustrator.
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David Maisel
- Occupations
- photographer
- Biography
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David Maisel is an American photographer and visual artist whose works explore vestiges and remnants of civilizations both past and present. His work has been the subject of five major monographs, published by Nazraeli Press, Chronicle Books, and Steidl.
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Guy Colwell
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Guy Colwell is an American painter and occasional underground cartoonist. Although not African-American himself, Colwell's comics often portray blacks in strong roles in stories of life on the streets. His "Figurative Social Surrealist" paintings reflect on the human condition, economic inequality, injustice, and alienation from the natural world.
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Linn Meyers
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Linn Meyers, known professionally as linn meyers, is a visual artist based in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. She is known for dense, intricate drawings, paintings, installations and prints that range in scale from page-sized images to large pieces on Mylar and panel to monumental, site-specific wall works. Her art is rooted in a process of repetitive drawing—thousands of hand-drawn marks that come together to form rhythmic, patterned wholes and serve as records of their own making. While ostensibly abstract, her works are also widely suggestive of natural phenomena and fundamental aspects of the universe, from fingerprints to galaxies, and cellular patterns to tidal waves. Curator Anne Ellegood observed, "She is after a purity of making—a physical process that does not hide behind illusionism—a directness wherein the materiality of the work is evident and … all the mystery is removed so that it is what it is."
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Zigi Ben-Haim
- Occupations
- paintersculptor
- Biography
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Zigi Ben-Haim is an American-Israeli painter and sculptor who lives and works in New York City and Israel.
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Kate Colby
- Occupations
- poetwriter
- Biography
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Kate Colby is an American poet and essayist. She grew up in Massachusetts and received her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 1997, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked for several years as a curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, on the board of The LAB art space, and later as a grant writer and copyeditor. In 2008, she moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where she currently works as an editor and serves on the board of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts.
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Claudia Alvarez
- Years
- 1969-.. (age 56)
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Claudia Alvarez is a Mexican American painter and sculptor who has worked as an artist in residence in Mexico, Switzerland, France, and China. Alvarez's solo exhibitions include Claudia Álvarez: A Moment in Between at the Acércate at the National Arts Centre, Mexico City; Girls with Guns, Scott White Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; Falling, Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, Nebraska; Silence Water, Museum of Art Contemporary Yucatán, Mérida; American Heroes, Blue Leaf Gallery, Dublin; Things of a Child, The Latino Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; and History of Immigration, Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, Nebraska. Alvarez is based in New York City.
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Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
- Enrolled in the California College of the Arts
- Graduated with Master of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, also known as Olomidara Yaya, is an American artist, author, and assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley Department of Art Practice. Her work focuses on questions of race, sexuality, and history through a variety of visual and textual mediums. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Notable works include the Kentifrica project, the Tituba series, The Evanesced, and the Uninvited series. She is a member of CTRL+SHFT Collective in Oakland, California.
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Sonia Landy Sheridan
- Occupations
- photographerartistresearcher
- Biography
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Sonia Landy Sheridan, known as Sonia Sheridan, was an American artist, academic and researcher, who in 1969 founded the Generative Systems research program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was honorary editor of Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society for the Arts Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). Sheridan had received awards from numerous institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation in 1973 for Photography and the National Endowment for the Arts (1974–1975, 1976–1977, 1981–1982).
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William Underhill
- Occupations
- sculptor
- Biography
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William Underhill was an American sculptor.
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Alexis Krasilovsky
- Years
- 1950-.. (age 75)
- Occupations
- filmmakerfilm director
- Biography
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Alexis Krasilovsky is an American filmmaker, writer and professor. Krasilovsky's first film, End of the Art World documented artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Krasilovsky moved from New York to Los Angeles in the 1970s to pursue filmmaking, writing and directing through her company, Rafael Film. She is the writer and director of the documentary features, Women Behind the Camera and Let Them Eat Cake.
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Lee Walton
- Born in
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United States - Occupations
- performance artist
- Biography
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Lee Walton is an American visual artist whose artwork is regularly associated with the subject of sports. Walton has exhibited his work internationally in a variety of media including drawing, concept-based systems, performance art, video art, net art, and public projects. Several projects by Walton were included in the 2013 visual art exhibition Art of Sport at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York.
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Trinidad Escobar
- Occupations
- writer
- Biography
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Trinidad Escobar is an author, poet, and cartoonist active in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an educator at the California College of the Arts.
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Adrien Segal
- Occupations
- furniture makerartistteacher
- Biography
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Adrien Segal is an American artist, furniture maker, and sculptor, who uses data to inform her artwork. She is currently an adjunct professor of Furniture Design at the California College of the Arts and a practicing artist studio furniture maker.
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Warren Leopold
- Years
- 1920-1998 (aged 78)
- Occupations
- painterwar artistarchitect
- Biography
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Warren Leopold was an American architect, painter and craftsman who designed and built coastal homes in Cambria, California and throughout San Luis Obispo County, California and whose work is part of the organic school.
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Joseph del Pesco
- Occupations
- curator
- Biography
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Joseph Thomas Del Pesco is a contemporary art curator and arts writer. He is currently the International Director of Kadist.
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Nyeema Morgan
- Occupations
- draftspersoninstallation artistvisual artistconceptual artistcollagist
- Biography
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Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.
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John Chiara
- Occupations
- photographer
- Biography
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John Chiara is an American contemporary artist and photographer.
