Through this program, students have the opportunity to meet 1:1 with a skilled CCA alumni mentor over the course of three months. This is a great opportunity to conduct studio visits, get specialized critiques, learn about possible career paths, and gain insight into life after CCA.

Questions? Email our Alumni Engagement Manager at wertzbest@cca.edu

Please review our stellar roster of alumni mentors below and complete your application, which was sent to your CCA email, by Friday, February 28. We will make our final selection followed by an official program kick-off in March. The program will run until May 31, 2020.

Kryshana Ananthan
(BFA Graphic Design 2014)

Pronouns: She/her

Bio: Kryshana Ananthan (BFA, Graphic Design 2014) currently works as an Internal Communications Manager at Lyft — where she leads the production of Lyft's monthly all hands meetings — setting the agenda, producing content, directing and producing video content, as well as advising leaders on communications strategy, tactics, and coaching presenters. Since graduating, she has worked with a variety of clients both as a creative and a communicator. These include Coca-Cola, The United States Olympic Committee, BlackRock, and Thorn among others. Her work spans from presentation to print, digital interfaces, web design, and communications strategy. Kryshana believes in combining research, experimentation, and a sense of play to create well crafted experiences.

Best piece of advice you received from a professor / mentor?
If you're true to yourself, the work you create will reflect it.

Phil Balagtas
(MFA 2011)

Pronouns: He/Him

Bio: Phil has been a Visual & UX Designer since 2001 and has experience designing across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He is currently an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco,CA. He is also the founder of The Design Futures Initiative (DFI), a nonprofit that organizes the international Speculative Futures meetups and PRIMER conferences in the US and Europe. An educator and futurist, his events bring together designers, futurists, and strategists from all over the world to teach and speak about designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies.

Phil is also an avid public speaker—he has presented and taught workshops around the world on various topics including Design Facilitation, Digital Transformation, and Speculative Design. Delivering powerful statements around the importance of design and strategy to shape the future of society and businesses, he shares an amalgamation of experience from working across sectors and focuses on how to empower designers for social impact.

Best piece of advice you received from a professor/mentor?
In the context of thinking I had come up with a solution to a problem... "Keep Going".

Keith Criss
(Painting/Drawing 1977)

Pronouns: He/Him

Bio: Originally from the Aloha state, Keith W. Criss lived abroad throughout his youth — from Japan to Germany. Those multi-cultural experiences provided a foundation to forever enrich and influence his present day creative perspective and endeavors.

An alumnus of the California College of the Arts, Keith has produced illustration, graphic design, multimedia, and fine art works for a host of corporate, publishing, and institutional clientele. His current works include promotional design & video production for indie musicians and title design for the award winning indie feature film “East Side Sushi.” Beyond the studio, Keith taught CCA(C) extension courses in traditional approaches to illustration from 1980-82 and illustration incorporating digital media at the Academy of Art University from 1993-94 and 2000. He served as President of the San Francisco Society of Illustrators from 1993 to 1996.

Throughout the years, his fine art , Illustration, & graphic works have been accepted into national and regional juried shows and have garnered a few awards and honors along the way.

Where in the Bay is your favorite place to see art?
Split between First Fridays at the Oakland Museum and the CCA Student/Alumni shows!

Daniel Dallabrida
(MFA 2011)

Pronouns: He/Him

Bio: “In 1988, I was told that I had 18 months to live. Now, after 31 years of not being dead, I want to understand why.”

Like many of his generation, Daniel abandoned his imagined life-path to confront the AIDS epidemic. During its first decades, he facilitated dialogue and encouraged collaboration between activists, patients, governments, and drug companies. Then, approaching fifty, Daniel began to focus on understanding and sharing his experience as a survivor. Today, his activism is as artist/storyteller. Rather than sharing a narrative, however, he releases the essence of a story triggering memories and questions. With ceramic, photography, excavations of history, pigment, film, and fabric as co-conspirators, Daniel asks viewers to find themselves in his art and to share stories of their own. “Stories calm the cyclones in our heads,” says Daniel. “They provide the symbols and words to speak with each other about the human condition.”

In 2003, with a move to Italy in pursuit of the art, culture, and language of his heritage, Daniel apprenticed at a Venetian family foundry. He initiated his academic study of art in Florence. In 2011, Daniel received an MFA from California College of the Arts. He has been an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, LASALLE College of the Arts, Fondazione Pistoletto, and Kala Art Institute. His art has been presented in Milan, Rome, Florence, Oakland, Singapore, Kansas City, Aspen, and San Francisco. Daniel lives with his partner in San Francisco and Tuscany. He is represented by Kalpa Art Living Galleries, Volterra, IT.

What’s one thing you wish you’d known as a CCA student?

Consider your future art practice as a portion of your income stream. Interview older artists to understand their practice. Ask them how much (percentage) of their income comes from selling their art. And where does the rest come from. Teaching? Industrial design? Podcasting? Corporate work? Restaurant work? Writing? Plan your future and education according to how you would like to see that your career and income evolve.

Larissa Erin Greer
(MFA 2012)

Pronouns: She/her

Bio: Larissa Erin Greer (MFA 2012) is an artist, writer and creative director. She works on creative development and innovation projects with companies like IDEO, Facebook, Williams-Sonoma and Levi's, in addition to helping dozens of startups and small businesses. Larissa's work focuses on the everyday, and her practice is centered around creating stories, systems, products, experiences and processes designed to delight, inform, connect and strengthen the communities they serve. Her time spent studying studio art and design at CCA has greatly informed her process, where she seeks to investigate the unknown and build a better future. http://www.hologramstudio.co

What’s one thing you wish you’d known as a CCA student?

I wish I had known how much technology would end up influencing my work and vice versa.

Shawn HibmaCronan
(BFA Sculpture/Furniture 2009)

Pronouns: He/His

Bio: Shawn HibmaCronan creates large-scale sculptures intended to engage viewers, activate the surrounding environment, and spark conversation. Often created from wood, steel, and objects with story, his work aims to embrace traditional and contemporary methods of making. Craftsmanship is critical in his work as no material is disguised and no mechanism is hidden; the resulting forms are honest, tangible, and iconic.

HibmaCronan's work has been featured in Oakland Magazine, ABC7 News, SFist.com, Woodwork Magazine, Multilingual Magazine, Glance Magazine, and Craftzine. HibmaCronan has exhibited in galleries and institutions including a solo exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, The San Francisco International Airport, The Basement Gallery, Sonoma State University, California Shakespeare Theater, and The Crucible's Cathedral Gallery. In 2011 he was a speaker at the 24th Annual Creative Summit Design Conference in San Marcos Texas. Since graduating from CCA with a degree in Sculpture and Furniture, HibmaCronan has mentored students at the California College of the Arts and taught woodworking the Crucible Arts Center.

He has received multiple public and private commissions including large scale and site-specific works. His work resides in corporate and private collections including The North Face, Inc., Hyper Arts, and has two pieces in the collection of Compass Books Inc., both on permanent view at the San Francisco International Airport in terminals 2 and 3.

HibmaCronan has participated in multiple artist-in-residence programs such as Autodesk's Pier 9 Workshop, The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) We/Customize, and was an artist-in-residence for a show titled "Out of Hand/Hands On" at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York City.

In 2012 HibmaCronan launched an ongoing multi-year sculpture project titled Love, Inertia, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Stance. The project focuses on the effort to transform a 1963 Ford Falcon Deluxe Clubwagon into a fully re-engineered and completely customized “street legal” sculpture and art space that highlights the fascination of popular American car culture.

Sarah Hobstetter
(MArch 2010)

Pronouns: She/Her

Bio: Sarah Hobstetter (MArch 2010) was born in San Francisco, California where she currently lives and works. She studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art and architecture at California College of the Arts. Sarah is a licensed Architect in the State of California and founder of Hobstetter Architecture Studio. Sarah has exhibited her art internationally and has been published in Metropolis, ID, Divisare, and Dezeen. Sarah Hobstetter creates work on the themes of spatial memory, atmosphere, and experience. Often inspired by the existing context or environment, her works are notable for their strategic use of light and ghostly explorations of form and void. Her work ranges a variety of media, across painting to architecture and is unified by a minimal sensibility and eerie sense of contemplation.

Where in the Bay is your favorite place to see art?

For experimental music, RS94109 on Larkin Street in the Tenderloin. They are a record shop and coffee shop by day, but at night they host sets focusing on heavy electronic music. I also recently discovered Lorna Kollmeyer's ornamental plaster studio in Hunters Point. It is well worth a visit to see the extraordinary collection of plaster casts and objects. She has created an important archive for the Bay Area's architectural heritage.

Steve Jones
(BFA Graphic Design 1992)

Pronouns: He/Him

Bio: Steve Jones is an award-winning graphic designer/artist. He is the Principal of Oakland-based plantain studio hybrid, multi-disciplinary design studio. plantain attempts to merge design processes, disciplines, fundamentals and theory to produce a strong, dynamic, thoughtful and cohesive design solution. Every element must relate to the next in order to produce a design that is memorable and makes your heart thump. We feel that the work should be original, or at least an engaging spin on the familiar.

Working primarily with nonprofits and community based organization, plantain studio's philosophy and approach to graphic design combines the personal with the formal—a place where function and form meet metaphor and allegory. We seek a balance between design and life, the individual and the collective.

My West Indian background also influences my outlook on the world. plantain’s work is a fusion of culture, politics and ideas—intended to help fill the cultural void within the current design landscape.

Best piece of advice you received from a professor/mentor?

Doing work for close friends or family should be free, or not at all.

Vernon Keeve III
(MFA Writing 2015)

Pronouns: He/Him

Bio: Vernon Keeve III is a Virginia born writer. He currently lives and teaches in Oakland. His purpose is to teach the next generation the importance of relaying their personal narratives, sharing their experiences, and taking control of their destinies. He holds a MFA from CCA, and a MA in Teaching Literature from Bard College. His full-length collection of poetry, Southern Migrant Mixtape, was published by Nomadic Press in 2018 and is the recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award.
Best piece of advice you received from a professor/mentor?

As a writer, the best advice I got from a CCA instructor was to keep writing and to read my work in front of audiences as much as possible. And, I thank the Universe that I did so, because my publishers approached me after a reading at Pegasus Books.

Iran Narges
(BFA Graphic Design 2007)

Pronouns: She/Her

Bio: Iran is currently Lead Service Designer at San Francisco Digital Services, working on the city’s new Permit Center (opening in Summer 2020), and leading the Service Design team.

She began practicing Service Design in 2013 at Adaptive Path, building on 15 years of graphic design and art direction experience across a wide range of industries and media. In her previous role as Design Director at Capital One, she led a team focused on scaling service design and strategic design capabilities across the enterprise. She also enjoys teaching and speaking about service design, graphic design, and the intersection of making and strategy.

In 2017, she helped develop and teach the first Adaptive Path Service Experience Intensive. She also developed and taught CCA’s first-ever undergraduate Service Design elective with fellow CCA and Adaptive Path alum Amber Reed (FA16, FA17, FA18).

Her design work has been recognized by design publications and organizations including the Type Director’s Club, HOW Magazine, Surface Magazine, and AIGA’s annual “50 Books/50 Covers” competition. She has a BFA (High Distinction) in graphic design from California College of the Arts.

In 2017, Iran officially became a public artist with the installation of her design for the Athens Avalon Greenspace tiled stairway. In 2018, she was part of the pro-bono design team that created the Safer Inside demonstration safe injection site, hosted by Glide and the Tenderloin Health Improvement Project.

Tracy Ren
(BFA Ceramics 2018)

Pronouns: She/Her

Bio: Tracy Ren is an artist and educator based in Oakland, CA. She came to CCA after spending three years at Rutgers University studying biology, followed by another three years living and working in New York City. Tracy makes work that is motivated by an interest in the human body/mind and its many complex mechanisms, the poetics of space, material culture, objecthood, the processes of loss and reclamation as they relate to her experience as the daughter of immigrants, and the ways in which these subjects might intersect. Although her focus at CCA was in ceramics, she revels in the magic of being a beginner, an interest that has led her to experiment with an array of materials and methods. She has held residencies / fellowships at Watershed (ME), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (CO), Penland School of Crafts (NC), and Mutual Stores (CA). She is currently working on two curatorial projects that are slated to premiere this summer.

What’s one thing you wish you’d known as a CCA student?

To prioritize rest. I wish I'd known how important it was to maintain a healthy body / mind. Also to not try and do everything on my own, to ask for help. It's a great way to form creative relationships with your classmates too, and an opportunity to share resources with each other. You seriously can't do it alone.

Bennett Rust
(BFA Animation 2013)

Pronouns: He/Him

Bio: Bennett Rust is a 2D animator and illustrator located in Oakland, CA. He currently works as a full time 2D Animator for Osmo, a tech company in Palo Alto that utilizes tangible toys in conjunction with iPad based digital games for children 5-9. He has worked previously with eLearning Mind, an educational content company that specializes in internal corporate visuals, creating animations and illustrations for larger companies such as Microsoft, Google and Tesla. He has also done commissioned work for The Portland Trail Blazers and 60 Second Docs. When not working on pieces for other companies, he enjoys making films and smaller animations, usually to his own composed music. He is currently working on a music video for the pop punk band Small Parks.

What’s one thing you wish you’d known as a CCA student?

TRY EVERYTHING. Take fine arts classes. Take design classes. Don’t narrow down too far. Art school is meant to be your sandbox, and be sure to take advantage because you won't have this type of opportunity again. Trying all kinds of things will only help make your professional practice richer.