Visiting Artist

Devi Peacock

Founder and Executive Director of Peacock Rebellion

Devi Peacock is a South Asian non-binary storyteller, performing artist and community organizer based in Oakland, California. At the time of this interview, they were the founding Artistic and Executive Director of Peacock Rebellion, an Oakland-based BIPOC, queer- and trans-led arts organization, as well as the co-organizer of the Liberated 23rd Ave. cultural land trust in Oakland. They additionally were an organizer at the Queer Cultural Center, home of the National Queer Arts Festival and a cultural equity Fellow with Emerging Arts Professionals and the Community Arts...

Ted Purves

Artist, Writer, and Founder of the Social Practice Program at CCA

Ted Purves was an independent artist, editor, and curator. His work has been exhibited and published in many venues and journals throughout California, as well as in New York, Boston, Albany and several cities in Germany. Purves has won funding from the Creative Work Fund in San Francisco and the Headlands Center for the Arts and been an artist-in-residence at The Djerassi Colony and the Drawing Residency Program. He taught at the California College of The Arts in Oakland and Master of Arts and Consciousness Program in Berkeley. He received his MFA in Photography...

Ronald Rael

ARC Fellow, Designer, Architectural Researcher, Author, Entrepreneur, Professor of Architecture and and Chair of Art Practice at UC Berkeley

Professor Ronald Rael is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture in the Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design, and is also a member of the art faculty in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California Berkeley. His past leadership roles have included serving as Department Chair, Director of the Masters of Architecture, and Director of the Masters of Advanced Architectural Design programs.

He is distiguished as being both a Bakar...

Michael Rakowitz

Conceptual Artist

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist working at the intersection of problem-solving and troublemaking. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palais de Tokyo, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th and 14th Istanbul Biennials, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, Transmediale 05, FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, and CURRENT:LA Public Art Triennial. He has had solo projects and exhibitions with Creative Time, Tate...

Nuno Ramos

Artist, Designer, Sculptor, Scenographer, Filmmaker, Composer, and Writer

Nuno Ramos is a Brazilian artist based in São Paulo. Ramos gained early recognition in the 1980s through his association with Casa 7, a group of young paulista painters who sought to move beyond the modernist aesthetics that had dominated Brazilian art in the mid-century. Largely self-trained, painters of the Casa 7 group were known for the kinetics, vibrance, and velocity of their art, which rebelled against the staid geometries of their parents’ generation, and which critics associated with the violence of a newly urbanized Brazil notorious for the...

Raqs Media Collective

Multimedia Artist Collective

Raqs Media Collective (* 1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta). The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation...

Will Rawls

Contemporary Choreographer, Performance Artist, Curator, Writer, and Associate Professor in The Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA

Will Rawls is a New York-based choreographer, dancer, and writer whose work unfolds at the edges of sense when dance and language clash. His multi-disciplinary work exists at theaters, galleries and museums, and focuses on how black performance rescripts the visibility and erasure inherent in anti-black perception. His next work, [siccer], will premiere in 2023. He has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim, The Alpert Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, United States Artists, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and...

Wendy Red Star

Contemporary Multimedia Artist

Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) lives and works in Portland, OR. Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), both of which have her works in their permanent collections; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (Paris, France), Domaine de Kerguéhennec (Bignan, France), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Hood Art Museum (Hanover, NH), St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN), the Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), among...

Charles Renfro

Architect and Partner at the Diller Scofidio + Renfro Firm

Charles Renfro was born in Baytown Texas in 1964. He is a practicing architect and has been based in New York City since 1989. He joined Diller + Scofidio in 1997 and was promoted to partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in 2004. DS+R is an interdisciplinary studio that fuses architecture, the visual arts and the performing arts while investigating issues of contemporary culture such as the spatial conventions of the everyday, the influence of media technologies on architecture, the changing definitions of domesticity, and the institution in the public realm. As...

Favianna Rodriguez

Interdisciplinary Artist, Cultural Strategist, and Social Justice Activist

Favianna Rodriguez Giannoni is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and entrepreneur based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her work centers joy and healing, while challenging entrenched myths and dominant cultural practices. Favianna's creative partnerships include companies like Ben & Jerry's, Spotify, Old Navy, and Playboy Magazine. She has completed a number of large scale public art commissions with the City of San Francisco and the Presidio...