Elissa Callen is an ecological artist working with local plants and fungi to make natural inks and pigments she uses as the staple materials in her art practice. She holds a BFA in Painting & Drawing from California College of the Arts, has a professional background in horticulture, and nearly ten years of experience using natural, locally gathered materials sustainably for color. Her practice is informed by her research in California ecology and the impact invasive plant species have on native biodiversity.

She has taught with institutions throughout California including Theodore Payne Foundation, Point Reyes National Seashore, Save the Bay, numerous mycological societies, schools, and more. She believes in using her work with sustainable natural materials as a means of increasing community interest in environmentalism, preservation, and connectedness to the native landscape.

Website: http://elissacallen.com

IG: @slateandrust

Natural Art Materials Workshop

Bec Imrich is an artist, writer, and educator born in Cambridge and working in San Francisco. Her interdisciplinary practice is grounded in drawing and photography. She holds an MFA in studio practice and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies, both from California College of the Arts. Bec also teaches in the Art Practice department at UC Berkeley and previously worked in the education departments at The Phillips Collection as well as Aperture Foundation where she helped to develop Aperture’s visual literacy curriculum, Aperture On Sight. They have exhibited work throughout the Bay Area and beyond, including Minnesota Street Projects, Bass and Reiner, the de Young, and Humble Arts Foundation.

Intermediate/Advanced Photography

Experimental Photography (High School Workshops)

Born and raised in Modesto, California, Don Porcella’s artwork has been exhibited at galleries and museums across North America, Europe and Asia. Porcella’s art has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue Magazine, Architectural Digest, NY Magazine and Yahoo to name just a few. Porcella has a BA in Psychology from the University of California at San Diego, a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. Porcella’s work is included in public and private collections across the United States, Europe and Asia. Porcella has received grants from the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island, the Brooklyn Arts Council, an EAF Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park, the 2012 West Collects Prize, an artist residency at the Museum of Arts and Design, and a 2014 Swatch Art Residency in Shanghai, China. In 2015, Porcella collaborated with an artist from Iran and their work was featured in the 2015 Venice Biennial.

See more about Don at donporcella.com.

Professional Practice for Artists

Nina Taylor Kester (s/he/they) is a freelance storyteller, the founder of Become Storied, an instructor at CCA, and Co-Founder of the QCExpo & Prism Awards. Previously Nina has been the Programs Coordinator at the Cartoon Art Museum, a Colorist for BOOM! Studios, and an online media and community specialist for Tapas Media, Lightstream Animation, PEANUTS and Archie Comics.

See their work here

Journaling & Memoir Techniques for Comics

Jeanette Au is an interdisciplinary artist, knitwear designer and educator in San Francisco. She was raised in the Lower East Side of New York City and trained in painting and drawing at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music, Art and the Performing Arts. She holds a BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute and a MFA in Knitwear Design from the Academy of Art University. She has presented her knitwear collection in Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week. She has taught BFA fashion courses at Academy of Art University and California College of Art as well as textile arts and visual arts in San Francisco public schools and nonprofits. Jeanette Au’s work blurs and transgresses the boundaries between fashion and art, exploring cross-cultural dialogues and liminal space. As an educator she shares inspiration, process and an exploration of material and techniques to discover and to delight in the unexpected.

Check out her work on IG.

Fashion Workshop: Introduction to Knitwear

Cyanotypes for Fashion and Textile Design (High School Atelier)

Fashion Design: Upcycling (High School Atelier)

Yael Levy is a mixed media artist, storyteller, printmaker and art teacher based in Berkeley, CA. She draws, paints, collages and writes. Yael often self publishes her work, and sometimes prints and binds it by hand. She loves playing with forms and format and mixing digital and tactile techniques. In recent years, Yael has taught as a Teaching Artist with Kala Art Institute, Richmond Art Center and JCC of the East Bay. Her work has been published by The Nib (2018), Birdy Magazine (2019) and Forward Comix (2017 & 2020).

See her work here

Introduction to Screenprinting

Exploring Watercolor

Olivia Shih is a contemporary jewelry artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Born in the United States and raised in Taiwan, she is interested in the cultural nuances that can be explored through wearable sculpture. She is fascinated by and works with a wide range of materials, including metal, stone, wood, and plastic. 

Shih holds a BA from Columbia University and a BFA from the California College of the Art. Her work has been exhibited across the USA and internationally, from Japan to Canada to Malaysia, and can be seen in person at Patina Gallery and Shibumi Gallery. In addition to making jewelry, Shih is the editorial assistant at Metalsmith and writes for both the magazine and Art Jewelry Forum.

To view more of Olivia's work, visit OliviaShih.com.

Introduction to Jewelry Making

Alex L Combs (he/they) is a cartoonist and sign artist who is currently working on his first full-length graphic novel. Since graduating with an MFA in comics in 2019 he has been teaching comics and hand lettering in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alex first got into lettering through tattoo art and found that he enjoyed incorporating hand lettering into his comics and other artwork. He enjoys sharing the art skills he’s acquired with others and strives to create a learning environment that supports students in developing their own styles and pursuing their unique passions.

You can see Alex's lettering work here

Illustration Techniques

Amy Tavern is a visual artist, metalsmith, and instructor whose work focuses on memory, emotional response, and place. She holds a BA in Arts Administration from the State University of New York College at Fredonia, a BFA in Metal Design from the University of Washington in Seattle, and a MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has exhibited widely with solo shows in the US, Belgium, and Sweden and in 2019, she was chosen as one of five artists from Northern California for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ program, "Women to Watch." She has taught and lectured across the US and in Europe, and her work has been featured in many publications including Metalsmith and American Craft. Amy is a former Penland School of Crafts resident artist and has completed numerous residencies in Iceland.

Creative Practice for Artists: Exploring Process, Building a Language

Carolina Cuevas's work is about stories that places and people carry with them. The tension of our relationships, the body, and material. She uses clay, fibers, and the archive as a way to demonstrate the constant evolution of these stories and relationships. Carolina Cuevas is an artist currently based in the Bay Area. Cuevas completed her Master's in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Minnesota Street Project, Berkeley Art Center, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, San Jose’s Quilts and Textile Museum, International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, Hungary, and in Kansas City Artist Coalition. 

Beginning Sculpture/3D Foundations

Patrick Dintino  is a fine artist whose paintings and collages have been exhibited internationally. He co-founded Artists in Motion art collective, a group of artists that created funk-art fashion, sculpture, and furniture out of reclaimed materials. In 2000, he was invited as a guest artist to work with Sol LeWitt to create Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective at SFMOMA. A finalist for SFMOMA’s SECA emerging artist award, and a recipient of the Pollack/Krasner Foundation Grant, Dintino was included in the group show, The Future of Abstraction, at the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York City. He is represented by Andrea Schwartz Gallery in San Francisco and Muriel Guepin Gallery in New York. He earned a BA at San Diego State University where he studied environmental design in the graduate program and a BFA and MFA at California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA.)

BA, San Diego State University; California College of the Arts: BFA, MFA

See his work here

Painting: Abstraction

Painting: Your Body of Work

Evri Kwong received a BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He also was  awarded a full fellowship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Maine. His work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions around the country and abroad. Kwong's social justice drawings and paintings have been viewed in venues such as Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles; Dwight-Hackett Projects, Santa Fe NM; Catharine Clark Gallery, SF; DeYoung Museum, SF; Alternative Museum, NYC; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Rena Di Rosa Preserve, Napa; and Crocker Museum, Sacramento, among many more. He has been the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant and the Adolph Gottieb Grant. His work is in numerous private and public collections as well as Museums. Kwong's background growing up in a Zen Center and surrounded by Hippie culture and artists was a training ground for his art and teaching methods .

Basics & Beyond: Oil Painting

Basics & Beyond: Drawing

Barbara Pollak-Lewis is a painter, curator and art educator living in San Francisco. Prior to becoming a F/T fine artist, Barbara spent 25 years as a freelance illustrator, app designer and author, specializing in YA books, games and magazines. Ms. Pollak-Lewis received her BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MA in Art Education from Boston University. She has worked as a teaching artist and art educator throughout the SF Bay Area while exhibiting her paintings nationally. Recently she curated an exhibit at Arc Gallery in San Francisco with the theme of “unusual self portraits”. In much of her work she expresses complex emotions through the human form.

To see her paintings and other fine art: www.barbarapollakart.com

Click to follow on Instagram

Figure Drawing for High School Students

Illustration for High School Students

Darian Newman is an inspired and driven visual designer and art director with a special interest in branding, image-making, editorial design, and typography. With an educational background in graphic design, public communications, and studio art, he currently works with Dropbox and re-inc. Darian embraces opportunities to collaborate with others, build brand identities, and bring ideas to life for commerce and cultural institutions.

Adobe Creative Cloud Intensive

Building a Brand

Daniel Arthur Mendoza is an artist whose work is made from cut and sewn secondhand fabrics and drawings that celebrate queer history, joy, and friendship and its historical veiled-ness within the confines of daily life. Exploring themes of intimacy, repression, and refusal, Mendoza's work reveals a longing to rediscover the past, confront the weight of patriarchal visual propaganda, and open oneself to potential, soft, hopeful futures. Mendoza’s work has been exhibited at Human Resources Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, CA), Southern Exposure (San Francisco, CA), Rivalry Projects (Buffalo, NY), Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA) among others. He received an MFA at UC Riverside in 2022, received a BA in Studio Art at UC Davis in 2013, and attended the Chautauqua Institution Schools of the Fine and Performing Arts in Chautauqua, New York. He lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Basic Drawing & Beyond

Born in Kawasaki, Japan, Hifumi Ogawa is a painter who lives and works in the Bay Area.  She received her BFA and MFA in Painting/Drawing from CCA.  Her paintings have been exhibited in the United States and in Japan and are part of collections, including Barclay Simpson Fine Arts Gallery in Lafayette, CA and The Hess Art Collections in Napa, CA and in Liebefeld_Bern, Switzerland.  Hifumi’s works have been represented by Catherine Clark Gallery and SFMOMA Artists’ Gallery in San Francisco, CA.  She works in mixed media from tiny to large scales. She often combines drawing and painting elements and uses various mediums such as oil and acrylic paints, ink, color pencils, oil pastels, and bee’s wax.

Introduction to Painting

Merl Ross is a painter whose work has been exhibited nationally and is included in numerous public and private collections. She is the recipient of a California Magazine Discovery Award and has taught painting at UC Berkeley and CCA for numerous years.

Merl is an abstract artist working in mixed media on canvas and paper on both large and small scales. Her art was recently included in the Open Exhibition at the de Young Museum of San Francisco and in a solo exhibit at the pop up Moss Gallery in Berkeley, CA.  

She is represented by Jennifer Perlmutter Gallery.

See her work here

BA, MA, MFA, UC Berkeley.

Intermediate/Advanced Painting

GB Tran is an Eisner nominated cartoonist and the author of the graphic memoir Vietnamerica. Included by Time Entertainment on its all-time “Top 10 Graphic Memoir” list, it also earned the Society of Illustrators' gold medal for Sequential Art and the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Gregory M. Nonfiction Literature Fellowship. Since self publishing his first comic in 2003—the Xeric awarded Content—his stories have strived to use comic's idiosyncratic language as a vehicle to explore memoir and autobiography.

Prior to joining CCA, GB was a freelance Brooklyn cartoonist and illustrator. Upon accepting a graphic design position at the fashion company Old Navy, he moved to the Bay Area which is when he joined CCA’s faculty and has taught in its MFA in Comics program since 2015. GB's pedagogy draws from eclectic approaches and processes from his extensive creative career. In recognition of the latter, he was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the first cartoonist to be selected since Alison Bechdel.  In between graphic design, cartooning and teaching, GB also gives artist talks that usually begin with Vietnamerica as a launching pad to explore universal themes of memoir, multiculturalism, and the medium of comics.

See GB's work here

Making Comics: The Art of Reading (online)

Jade Muir is a 3d storyteller, interior and environmental designer, and Oakland native who loves incorporating play and imaginative elements into her work. Since graduating with a BFA in interior design in 2019, she has been working on retail, workplace, and educational designs. She has been involved in various large-scale design projects from the design of Crunchyroll offices and cannabis flagship dispensaries to developing a set of standards for all classroom designs at UC Berkeley. Jade’s practice is informed by play, empathy, and exploration. She enjoys collaborating and skill sharing and strives to create a fun, supportive, and exciting learning environment. To view more of Jade’s work, visit

https://www.jademuir.design.

Introduction to Interior Design

Yael Levy is a mixed media artist, storyteller, printmaker and art teacher specializing in visual storytelling. Born and raised in Israel, she is currently based in the East Bay. She first moved to New York City in 2002 to attend the Art Students League of New York; later she completed a BFA of Illustration from Parsons the New School for Design (2011) and an MFA in Comics from California College of the Arts (2017). In recent years she has been a teaching artist with Kala Art Institute, the Richmond Art Center, Junior Center for Arts and Science and SFUSD Libraries. Her work has been published by The Nib (2018), Birdy Magazine (2019), Forward Comix (2017 & 2020), The Baylies (2021) and the Sequential Artist Workshop (2021) and shown in various art galleries over the years.

Her personal work is based on her own experience as a brown, bi-racial, bilingual and bisexual woman. Since this is a-lot to unpack, she often takes more pleasure in telling others’ stories, making up imaginary creatures or just painting images of beautiful nature. She believes the creative process to be its own reward and the act of making an incredible tool for healing and growing. She uses drawing, painting, collage, writing and a mix of digital methods to create visually compelling and emotionally layered stories, loves playing with form and format and mixing digital and tactile techniques.

See her work here 

Exploring Watercolor

High School Screenprinting

Ebti is a multidisciplinary artist, a self-taught photographer and a translator living between Cairo and San Francisco. 

She received her MFA in Fine Art from the California College of the Arts in 2021.

"My practice is informed by translation, languages, theater, literature, music and my family’s making-traditions I never got to learn. Through this multifaceted, dislocated lens I look at the idea of home, belonging, and attachment. Though my work is rooted in photography, I am constantly looking for new materials and methods that will best translate my ideas. Once I start working on a project, I embrace notions of accident and failure. My practice is ever-evolving and is influenced by my restlessness."

R. Max Gavrich is a San Francisco-born artist and educator. He works across photographs, video, film, and installation. His recent projects span ambulatory studies of place (Stockton and the Central Valley; Lugo, a small town in northern Italy) to short movies capturing the daily rituals of boys and men (Elvis Tribute Artists; arm wrestlers), to sculptural works that speak to the complex relationship between bodies, images and objects through processes of aggregation and assembly, deformation and breakdown. Previous exhibitions include Casemore Kirkeby, Marlborough Gallery, Winter Street Gallery, Five Points Gallery, the Vermont Center for Photography, the Museo San Rocco, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, among others. He holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Yale University. He teaches at California College of the Arts and lives in San Francisco with his cat Agnes.

www.richardmaxgavrich.com

Alicia Escott is an interdisciplinary artist based in the land we currently call San Francisco, she/they practices in solidarity with thinkers across fields undoing the construct of “nature” as a thing separated from us and our world. Escott work is informed by how we each negotiate our day-to-day realities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate-chaos, mass-extinction— and the social unrest this rapid change and unprocessed grief produces. Her work makes space for the unspoken individual and collective experiences of loss, heartbreak and grief. She/they approach these issues with an interstitial practice encompassing writing, drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture, social-practice, composting, seed-planting, and activism.

Escott teaches drawing in the first-year program at CCA, trained as a painter, Escott has expanded that field in their own work. Their work has been shown in over 100 art institutions, galleries, and alternative spaces— including exhibitions at Berkeley Arts Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The San Francisco Maritime Museum, The Berkley Art Museum, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbra. She/they have been an Artist in Residence at Dream Farm Commons, Recology, The Growlery, Djerassi Artist Residency, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Irving Street Projects and The JB Blunk Artist Residency. Escott is a founding member of the collective 100 Days Action and half of the Social Practice Project The Bureau of Linguistical Reality. Her work has been featured in The BBC, Smithsonian Magazine, The Economist, The New Yorker, KQED, MOMUS, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. Her She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, where she received the Richard K. Price Scholarship for Painting and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago.

HyeYoon Song is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in print, painting and sculpture. Having been born in South Korea and experiences of migration to New Zealand and to the United States, her work finds its genesis in the narrative of migration and the role of Asian-diaspora chronicling the evolving perceptions of nationhood and cultural identity. Through writing, research and studio practice, her work examines the account of collective and personal nostalgia and the systems of assimilation through objectification. Compelled by the intersection of arts, education and the impact created in enacting social changes, her practice extends into designing project based curriculum integrating technical skills to equip young people to exercise their voices and power. She currently holds a position as an Printmedia instructor at California College of the Arts (CCA) Printmedia program, Protest + Print lead instructor at Girls Garage. HyeYoon obtained a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA at the California College of the Arts.

See more at hyeyoonsong.com

Shao-Feng Hsu is a photographer whose work around the world mainly focuses on the interaction of humans and aquatic environments. From his native Taiwan — where he trained as a competitive swimmer — to Australia, Cambodia, Japan, and beyond, Shao-Feng Hsu has immersed himself in aquatic cultures in an ongoing study of the impact of the Anthropocene Era on our waters. In December 2017, he was selected to participate in Angkor Photo Festival Workshop, where he documented life in a village without proper sanitation and running water. Expanding on the project's themes back in Taiwan, he collaborated with the environmental NGO, RE-Think, on projects to illustrate shoreline pollution. His project, Inner Tidal Zones, combines color photograms and digital images to capture the perspective of aquatic creatures and the emotions of the water. He is a graduate of the Creative Practices program at the International Center of Photography and a recipient of Rita K. Hillman Award of Excellence. During the pandemic lockdown he co-founded Fotodemic.org and cademy.biz. He is currently a Fellow at the Headlands Center of the Arts and teaches B&W darkroom at California College of the Arts (CCA) Photography Program.

To view more of Shao-Feng's work, visit shaofenghsu.com

Miguel Novelo is a new media artist, filmmaker, and lecturer. Novelo graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a bachelor's in fine arts (2018) with an emphasis in film, art, and technology and recently received a master’s degree in Fine Arts from Stanford University (2022). Novelo has exhibited artworks and short films internationally at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the De Young Museum in San Francisco, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Festival Internacional de Cine in Morelia, Mexico; and Sheffield Doc/Fest in England, among others.

See more at Miguelnovelo.com.

Emma Strebel is an artist living and working primarily in Oakland. She started her art career in CCA's Young Artist Studio Program as a middle school-aged student.

She graduated from Aalborg University in 2020 with a MSc in Lighting Design and from NYU in 2015 with her BFA. She spent the 2015-2016 academic year as a Visual Arts Global Academic Fellow teaching Sculpture and Drawing at NYU Abu Dhabi. Emma has attended Artist Residencies at Djerassi (USA), Nature, Art and Habitat Residency (Italy), HEIMA (Iceland) and Holly and the Neighbors (USA). She is now the Imagery Collaborator to Jim Campbell where she creates and curates imagery for the Salesforce Tower “Day for Night” public artwork. She has shown her work in the United States, France, the United Arab Emirates, Iceland, Denmark and Italy.

Michael Thompson is a visual, conceptual, and technical consultant to clients working in technology-mediated areas of art and design with a BFA from CCA. With over 25 years experience in physical art installations, information design, technological solution architecture, and multimedia production, he focuses on work that requires an understanding of systems as well as visual communication—information systems and information design.

See Michael's work here