Visiting Lecturer

Joanna Haigood

Co-founder of Zaccho Dance Theatre

Since 1979 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, SF Exploratorium Museum, National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d'Avignon. She has also been honored...

Cheryl Haines

Principal of Haines Gallery and Founding Executive Director of the FOR-SITE Foundation

For more than 30 years, Cheryl Haines has developed exhibitions and site-specific public programs that have exposed new audiences to contemporary art and advanced the discourse surrounding what she describes as “art about place.” Through the FOR-SITE Foundation and her gallery, Haines presents provocative exhibitions by artists working across a wide range of media, as well as public, site-specific commissions on a national scale.

In 2003, Ms. Haines established the FOR-SITE Foundation to foster the creation, presentation, and public understanding of place-based art...

Hou Hanru

International Art Curator and Critic

Hou Hanru’s prolific curatorial work addresses contemporary practice and the conditions of artists living in the diaspora from the perspective of cultural hybridity. Hou gained international attention with Cities on the Move (1997-2000), a traveling exhibition he curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, which emphasized the ways in which Asian contemporary artists have dealt with rapid changes in urban lifestyles and values. He has also curated many seminal exhibitions in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, including international biennials in Shanghai (2000),...

Michelle Hensley

Founder of Ten Thousand Things Theatre Company

Michelle Hensley founded Ten Thousand Things Theater, where she directed and produced more than 60 tours of award-winning drama to audiences in prisons, shelters and housing projects, as well as to the general public. Many of her productions made the local critics’ Top Ten lists. A McKnight Theater Fellow, in 2005 she received the Francesca Primus Prize from the American Theater Critics Association for outstanding contribution to the American Theater.

TTT’s touring model has been adopted by at least a dozen theaters around the country including The Public Theater in...

Dee Hibbert-Jones

Filmmaker, Animator, Artist, and Professor of Art & Digital Arts New Media at UC Santa Cruz

Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy® award winning filmmaker and internationally recognized artist. Her work incorporates animation, installation, public art and documentary film examining power and politics: how people manage and who gets heard. She explores diverse subjects from land use and wasted resources, to criminal justice and indigent rights: examining what is considered valuable and who is dismissed as valueless.

Hibbert-Jones is a Guggenheim Fellow. She was most recently awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans...

John Horn

Former Los Angeles Times staff writer and Former Host of "The Frame"

John Horn was host of KPCC’s The Frame, a daily arts and entertainment program. He has covered culture for nearly 30 years, including serving for over a decade at the Los Angeles Times as lead writer on the film industry. Today, he is a correspondent for NPR’s 1A.

Kiko Mayorga

Co-Founder of the Escuelab.org Project

Kiko Mayorga researches and promotes the social adaption of technologies in Lima, Perú. He has worked in a range of curatorial and medial experiments dealing with the particularities of local technological appropiation. He is an active participant of the OLPC volunteering community in Perú, promoting and organizing talks, workshops, field activities, etc. Since 2009 he co-directs the Escuelab.org project, an informal school/laboratory in the center of Lima that hosts processes bridging technology, education and local culture. The activities in Escuelab contribute to...

Jordan Simmons

Former Artistic Director of East Bay Center for the Performing Arts

Richmond native and proud graduate of JFK High, Jordan Simmons served as Artistic Director at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts (1984 – 2021) and has been a faculty member since 1974. A graduate of Reed College, active Mestre of Capoeira, licensed Shakuhachi (Japanese flute) teacher, and theater director, Mr. Simmons’ portfolio includes more than 50 productions for theater and film – many of which have focused on the lives and concerns of youth and young adults from Richmond’s Iron Triangle and surrounding...

Lisa Steindler

Former Executive Artistic Director of Z Space

Lisa Steindler formely served as the Executive Artistic Director of Z Space in San Francisco. During her time at Z Space Lisa guided unheralded growth for the organization. In 2009, she engineered a long-term lease on Z Space’s first venue. Presently Z Space operates two venues, a black box and a 244-seat main stage, filling an essential role in the Bay Area’s arts ecology while continuing to raise Z Space's profile and partnerships both regionally and nationally. Lisa has created...

Luis Valdez

Playwright, Director

Luis Valdez is regarded as one of the most important and influential American playwrights living today.His internationally renowned, and Obie award-winning theater company, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers’ Theater) was founded by Luis in 1965 – in the heat of the United Farm Workers (UFW) struggle and the Great Delano Grape Strike in California’s Central Valley.His involvement with Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the early Chicano Movement left an indelible mark that remains embodied in all his work even after he left the UFW in 1967: his early actosLas Dos Caras del...