Visual & Critical Studies Graduate Program Chair

Jacqueline Francis, PhD, is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (University of Washington Press, 2012) and coeditor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (National Gallery of Art, 2011). Francis serves on the boards of Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture and the National Committee for the History of Art. Francis is also a curator—recent exhibitions include Fight and Flight: Crafting a Life in San Francisco (Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, 2023) and You Will Be Remembered: New Work by Adia Millett (Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong, 2022). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective of San Francisco, she is a writer who was awarded an Individual Artist Commission grant by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2017. Both Francis and the 3.9 Art Collective were named to the 2023 YBCA 100 list, in recognition of their work in the San Francisco Bay Area cultural community.

Visual & Critical Studies 2023 Master’s Project Thesis Directors

Việt Lê is an academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, 2021). The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with Latipa (Sming Sming Books, 2019). Lê has presented his work at the Banff Centre, the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, the Shanghai Biennale, the Rio Gay Film Festival, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among other venues. Lê curated the exhibitions Charlie Don’t Surf! (Centre A, Vancouver, 2005); transPOP: Korea

Vi ệt Nam Remix with Yong Soon Min (ARKO, Seoul; Galerie Quynh, Sài Gòn; UC Irvine Gallery; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2008–09); and the 2012 Kuandu Biennale (Taipei). He is also a board member of Art Matters and the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco.

Elizabeth Travelslight is an artist of mixed-race heritage (Filipinx/white) with a research background in feminist-postcolonial histories and futures of math, science, and technology. Her creative practice is an ongoing braid of teaching, community organizing, and studio research through text and textiles. Travelslight earned her BA in Mathematics and MFA in Digital Art–New Media from UC Santa Cruz, and her MA in Media Studies from the European Graduate School. She currently works as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts and serves as Political Coordinator for the CCA Union, a chapter of SEIU Local 1021.

Visual & Critical Studies 2023 Thesis Faculty Advisors

Nilgün Bayraktar is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program and Film Program at California College of the Arts. Her work, focusing on migrant and diasporic cinema, contemporary art, and critical border studies, has been published in journals including the Journal of European Studies, Screen City Biennial Journal, and New Cinemas. She is coeditor with Alberto Godioli of Stranger Things: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2023) and author of Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge, 2018), which examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Her current book project, Border Futurities: Countermemory and Speculative Imagination in the Cinema of Displacement, expands the chronological, geographic, and theoretical scope of her earlier research, looking beyond Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and the US–Latin American context to investigate the multiplication and diffusion of militarized borderlands. She received a BA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts, where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary art. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice questions assumptions about Death and the Dead themselves. Ephemeral and celestial are forms constructed with everyday gestures of domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, weaving, brushing, and braiding. Hennessy’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Wovenutopia, and the New Yorker, and in exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Pt. 2 Gallery. She has received awards from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Artadia, the Svane Family Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. Bogotá, Colombia) (they/them) is a trans visual artist, educator, and curator who explores the relationship between queer and trans kinship through constructed photographs, site-specific installations, and public programming. Their work is rooted in close dialogue and collaboration with trans, nonbinary, and queer friends and peers, most of whom are performers, artists, educators, policymakers, and community organizers. Their practice celebrates collective care and intergenerational connection while building sustainable trans futures and archiving trans history. Their work has been exhibited at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Palo Alto Art Center, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.