2021 Mentor Program
Program Overview
Through this program, students have the opportunity to meet at least 3 times one-on-one 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
Alumni Mentors
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?
Keep going" In response to when i was completely exhausted in trying to solve a difficult problem and thought i'd come up with the right answer. It's a simple 2 words, but when i'm stuck or think i've got it, "Keep Going" allows me to continue to look at problems from different perspectives and innovate my process and the solution
What’s one thing you wish you’d known as a CCA student?
How to prepare myself for the real world and shape my thesis and work so people in the business world would understand it and hire me.
How have you adapted your practice during shelter-in-place?
I started a podcast where i invite designers and artists to talk about articles/projects they've found on the internet (non-COVID). This has allowed me to stay connected with people, learn a lot of new things, and provide content back to my community to get their minds off of COVID and hopefully enlighten with different perspectives from really creative people. This has literally kept me sane and distracted and been key to my mental and physical survival during lockdown.
Chrissy Charlton
(DMBA 2018)
Pronouns: She/her
Bio: Chrissy Charlton has a background in product development (finance), UX research (software), and go-to-market strategy (subscription offerings). A committed community member, she was co-founder of CCA's inaugural women in leadership program and Commencement Speaker. Chrissy is proud to call Canada home and has a wealth of experience navigating the foreign-student-to-fully-employed-in-America space.
Currently a Business Model Strategist at Autodesk, she partners with business stakeholders, designers, and strategists to infuse customer insights into product and business model decisions. Together, they craft the digital platform experience for Autodesk's 200+ million users — including design professionals, engineers and architects, digital artists, students, and hobbyists around the world.
Best piece of advice you received from a professor/mentor?
The most important thing to learn at grad school is how to get the best out of people.
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.” Currently, he is working on a project documentary for Edge Innovations— known for their complex and creative technology-based creations in films such as Free Willy and The Perfect Storm. in late 2019, he and crew shot and produced a promotional video and stills for Edge Innovations / Oceanarium’s collaborative client demonstration of a prototype animatronic dolphin.
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.
Best piece of advice you received from a professor/mentor?
Listen intently…observe…ask questions …listen again…practice…practice more…repeat…
Daniel Dallabrida
(MFA 2011)
Pronouns: He/Him
Bio: Daniel's political awakening began during the riots following Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations. His involvement in the struggle for racial, queer, and women's equality includes organizing, direct action, and study. By the time he learned that he was HIV+ (1987), Daniel's activism was focused on his community's care and protection. In 1999, at the peak of his public relations career, Daniel responded to the AIDS Crisis by creating a new corporate/community collaboration model. Blending his HIV patient activism and corporate marketing experience, he facilitated the initial dialogue between these warring factions. Dallabrida & Associates expanded to other therapeutic areas, including epilepsy, breast cancer, and mental health. In 2000, Daniel consulted with Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation helping build HIV medical infrastructure in Rwanda and South Africa.
As he approached his fiftieth birthday, Daniel diverted to the path untaken. In 2003, he initiated an art practice with a move to Italy, pursuing the art, culture, and language of his heritage. There, he apprenticed at a Venetian family foundry and 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.
The best piece of advice you received from a professor/mentor?
Keep moving forward. This will not be the last piece of art you make. This will not be the last paper you write. This will not be your last critique. We learn by doing, by studying, by listening. Spend more time doing, absorbing, observing than you do worrying. When you fail, when you fall, get up. Look to where you stumbled, not to where you fell. Then move forward. Listen to criticism. Understand it as a gift of someone's experience and perspective. Consider it without emotion. Accept, reject or incorporate it, but able to articulate your own view.
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
Best piece of advice you received from a professor/mentor?
Make a bad first version. Put all of your worst, messiest, most cliche ideas into that first version... get them all out of your system. If it's bad, throw it out—but if it holds a kernel of truth, make another version. Keep making new versions until it's polished up just the way you want it. (Thank you forever, Steven Leiber)
How have you adapted your practice during shelter-in-place?
My practice has always been primarily based in my home studio, so I have been teaching my collaborators and clients how to work remotely without totally losing it. I have enjoyed watching everyone relax into sharing more of themselves throughout this process, and it's exciting to be able to experiment and build new ways of working together.
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.
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 (Trey)
(MFA Writing 2015)
Pronouns: Them/Them He/Him
Bio: Vernon Keeve III (Trey) is a Virginia born writer, living and teaching in Oakland. They hold an MFA from CCA and a MA in Teaching Literature from Bard College. Their full-length collection of poetry, Southern Migrant Mixtape, was published by Nomadic Press and received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award.
Before I moved to California I worked in a grocery store and one of my coworkers was an older Italian woman from New York. She worked in the coffee shop, and would often give me free coffee and pastries in the morning--something we both could've been fired for--but weren't. We developed a friendship four years in length, by the time I had my final conversation with her on my last day of work, before moving to California. She hugged me, wished me luck, and said "All artists should teach what they love." I have held onto that nugget of wisdom for almost ten years now, and it has always shown me the way when I felt lost and uninspired.
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.
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.
Jessica Violetta
(BFA Illustration 2017)
Pronouns: She/Her
Bio: Jessica Violetta is a painter and surface designer focusing on inclusive femininity with a little bit of an edge. Born in the Bay Area but raised in Central New Jersey, Jessica returned to San Francisco and received a BFA in Illustration from CCA in 2017. Her aesthetic was shaped by the drama of the catholic church, romanticizing overgrown nature, and navigating self expression amidst the female experience. Jessica worked as an in-house textile designer for Pottery Barn for 3 years after graduating while building her independent practice. She has shown her figurative paintings in several galleries and painted commercial murals for city offices, storefront signage, and restaurants. Jessica now lives and works out of her own studio on the New Jersey coast, right across from New York City.
What’s one thing you wish you’d known as a CCA student?
That your major will not matter at all once you get out of school. It is just "you", whatever unique blend of approaches and mediums and paths you build for yourself.