FACULTY

Jasmin DARZNIK, MFA, JD, PHD

Chair, Graduate Visual & Critical Studies Program
Associate Professor, MFA Writing

EMAIL: jdarznik@cca.edu

Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times-bestselling author of three books, most recently The Bohemians, which imagines the friendship between a young Dorothea Lange and her Chinese-American assistant in 1920s San Francisco. The novel was included in the New York Times Book Review's Summer 2021 reading recommendations and was one of Oprah Daily's best books of historical fiction for 2021.

Her debut novel Song of a Captive Bird was selected as a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and appeared on several “Best Of” lists in 2018, including Booklist, Reader’s Digest, and Newsweek. Darznik is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. 

Her books have been published in eighteen countries and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. 

Darznik has been featured in numerous academic journals, newspapers, and popular media, including National Public Radio, The Today Show, New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, MS., Vogue and other national and international venues.

She was born in Tehran, Iran and came to America as a child. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a J.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University.

For more about, visit her website.

Jacqueline Francis, PHD

Program Lead, Graduate Visual & Critical Studies Program

Dean, Humanities and Sciences Division

Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program

EMAIL: jfrancis@cca.edu

Jacqueline Francis is the dean of the Humanities and Sciences division at California College of the Arts. Since 2008, she has taught in the graduate Visual & Critical Studies and the undergraduate History of Art and Visual Culture programs; she has also taught in CCA’s Fine Arts division and mentored Fine Arts, Design, and Architecture division students at both the graduate and undergraduate level. She has held key leadership positions at CCA, including serving as chair of the Visual & Critical Studies program and as vice president of the Faculty Senate. She earned tenure and was promoted to Professor in 2022.

Francis is an art historian, curator, and creative writer. She researches and writes modern and contemporary US art histories; she has a special interest in the construction of past and present racialized identities and identifications which she considers in the critical framework of social art history. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012), the first book-length study of interwar expressionist American painting scrutinized through the lens of critical race art history. Francis has edited and co-edited several books dedicated to the works and influence of historical and present-day artists: Adia Millett (2020 and 2023 catalogues); Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011); Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? [writings inspired by the work of Lorraine O’Grady] (2023); and Sargent Claude Johnson (2024). She has published essays in other exhibition catalogs, peer-reviewed journals, and reference texts, and presented her research at museums, conferences, and colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia. She has been a visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, at San Francisco State University, and at Kenyon College.

Francis has served on the boards of research projects, scholarly publications, and member organizations that serve the field of art history and visual cultural studies, including The Living New Deal initiative, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture (London, UK), the College Art Association, and the US Latinx Art Forum. She is the Secretary of the National Committee for the History of Art, which is the US delegation to the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art.

Francis was the president of the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco (2017-2023). She is currently a member of the 3.9 Art Collective—a group of Black creatives dedicated to increasing the visibility of the city's Black artists, writers, and arts professionals. In 2023, Francis was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “100,” honored for her activism and leadership in the San Francisco Bay arts and culture community. She was the recipient of a 2017-18 Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission for work on a collection of short stories.

AB in English Literature, Dartmouth College

MA in African-American Studies, University of Wisconsin

PhD in the History of Art, Emory University

TT TAKEMOTO

Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program

TT Takemoto is a queer Japanese American artist and scholar exploring Asian American history, sexuality, and identity. Their work delves into hidden dimensions of same-sex intimacy and trauma existing within Asian and Asian American archives.

Takemoto interacts with found footage and archival materials through performance and labor-intensive processes of painting, lifting, and manipulating 16mm/35mm film emulsion using clear tape, razor blades, and nail polish. By engaging with tactile and sensory dimensions of queer histories, Takemoto conjures up immersive fantasies involving butch surgeons and homoerotic breadmaking. Their work honors queer Asian Americans who lived, loved, and labored together during the prewar era and beyond.

Takemoto has exhibited and performed at Asian Art Museum, de Young Museum, Catherine Clark Gallery, Chinese Culture Center, Oakland Museum of California, Peabody Essex Museum, SOMArts, SFMOMA, Vargas Museum (Philippines) and Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong). They have received grants from Art Matters, ArtPlace, Fleishhacker Foundation, Lucas Artists Program, and San Francisco Arts Commission.

Takemoto was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Experimental Film at Slamdance Film Festival and Best Experimental Film Jury Award at Austin LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (aGLIFF). Their film screenings include Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, BFI Flare (London), CROSSROADS, Documenta 15, MIX Milano, MIX Mexico, Marseille Underground Film Festival, Outfest, Queer Forever! (Hanoi), Rio Gay Film Festival, Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, TranScreen (Amsterdam), and Xposed International Queer Film Festival (Berlin).

Takemoto’s writings appear in Afterimage, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Art Journal, Densho Encyclopedia, GLQ, Hyphen, Journal of Visual Culture, Millennium Film Journal, Performance Research, Radical Teacher, Theatre Survey, Women and Performance, and the anthologies Queering Asian American Art, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, Saturation: Racial Matter, Institutional Limits, and the Excesses of Representation, and Thinking Through the Skin.

Over the past two decades, Takemoto has taught at California College of the Arts, where they served as dean of Humanities & Sciences (2018-2023). They currently serve as Director of Faculty Development & DEIB Academic Initiatives. They teach in History of Art and Visual Culture undergraduate program, Visual & Critical Studies graduate program, and Graduate Fine Arts. They were a member of the Queer Cultural Center’s Board of Directors (2008-2023) and co-founder of Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts.

BA, University of California, Berkeley; MFA, Rutgers State University of New Jersey; MA, PhD, University of Rochester

PATRICIA LANGE, PHD

Chair & Professor Visual and Critical Studies (Undergraduate Program)

Patricia Gonzalez Lange is an award-winning anthropologist and new media scholar. She is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies (undergraduate program). She has also taught in the Visual & Critical Studies department (graduate program). Her work focuses on mediated communication, technical identity performance, digital literacies, YouTube, and use of digital video to express the self and accomplish civic engagement. Her current work focuses on Latinas working in technological fields and in entrepreneurship, and the opportunities and challenges they encounter and overcome.

Recently, she co-edited The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology (Routledge, 2022). Through rich, ethnographic case studies detailed in 41 chapters by contributors from around the globe, the volume outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions in the field of media anthropology. Analyzing media from TV to tattoos, and from CD-ROMs to virtual reality, the volume provides wide-ranging explorations of how mediation influences communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, social change, and production and access to information and knowledge. Her chapter in that volume, "Media Migration," discusses how and why people change their online loci of interaction from one site to another, and how such migrations reveal expectations for online platforms of sociality.

Lange also published the book, Thanks for Watching: An Anthropological Study of Video Sharing on YouTube (University Press of Colorado, 2019), which details the experiences of early YouTube vloggers and how they used the site for sociality and creative self-expression. The book demonstrates how core concepts from anthropology—including participant-observation, reciprocity, community, and the posthuman—shed insight on analyzing patterns of sociality on YouTube. The National Communication Association named Thanks for Watching as the recipient of the Franklyn S. Haiman Award (2020) for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression. 

She also released an ethnographic film, Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media (2020). The film analyzes how early YouTubers used video to engage in sociality. It explores enduring and profound questions regarding media use. Through interviews and observational footage taken at YouTube meet-ups across the United States, Hey Watch This! delves into questions such as: Where is the "real me" located in and through mediated and in-person self-expression? What constitutes authentic participation on social media sites? How should we handle questions of scale and conflict in commentary? How can platforms support human mediation?

Lange's prior book Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies (Routledge, 2014) analyzes how kids are negotiating technical forms of identity and developing crucial new skills by participating on YouTube. More information about the book may be found on Facebook and in a four-part interview series conducted by renowned media scholar Henry Jenkins. Lange contributed to several of the earliest scholarly works on YouTube, including The YouTube Reader, and Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube. 

Lange also co-founded and served as the Inaugural Editor (2012-2014) of Platypus: The CASTAC Blog, which is the official blog of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, a division of the American Anthropological Association. Her work has been widely published in numerous journals including: Convergence; Explorations in Media Ecology; Pragmatics; Journal of Pragmatics; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; Visual Communication; Anthropology of Work Review; Games & Culture; Discourse Studies; Biography; Enculturation; and Human Organization. 

She received her Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. She received her Master’s in International Policy Studies and her Bachelor's degree in History from Stanford University.

A list of publications may be found at: http://www.patriciaglange.org/

AB, AM, Stanford University; MA, PhD, University of Michigan

Anne Shea, PHD

Anne Shea is an Associate Professor in the Writing and Literature Program and Director of Composition and Language Justice. Her fields of teaching and research include 20th- and 21st-century North American Literature, as well as Composition. She has published essays in Contemporary Literature, College Literature, MELUS, Pedagogy, Women’s Studies, and other venues. She was a participant in PoePolit, an international research project examining non-lyric poetry and its relationship to the political. Currently, she is working on a book about documentary poetry and neoliberal violence.

BA, Syracuse University; Ph.D., University of California, San Diego

thomas O. haakenson

Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program

Haakenson is former Associate Provost as well as Special Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Support at California College of the Arts (CCA). Prior to joining the CCA community, he served as Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs as well as Department Chair for Liberal Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Haakenson has received awards and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Transatlantic Program of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs & Climate Action, the U.S. Embassy Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service / Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department, and the Freie Universität / Free University - Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, among others. 

In 2021, Haakenson published the monograph Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada, which examines the radical avant-garde interventions of certain Berlin Dada artists as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific truth.

His current book projects include a critical reexamination of colonialism and the arts,  The Imaginary Avant-Garde: Decolonial Critique and Modern Western Art (University of Michigan Press), as well as the first English-language monograph on an influential but lesser-known German-Jewish Dadaist, titled  The Anonymous Jew: The Avant-Garde Life of Salomo "Mynona" Friedländer(Amsterdam University Press). His other long-term research projects are Internationalization Through Integration: Educational Reform in the Creative Professions in the E.U., China, and the U.S.A. (book/journal publications) as well as The Tainted Green Revolution: My Cousin Norman Borlaug and His Nobel Prize Legacy (book/journal publications).

BA, Drake University, 1995; MA, PhD, University of Minnesota, 2006

JEANETTE ROAN, PHD

Jeanette Roan is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in visual studies, cultural studies, and Asian American studies.  She received a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. Her first book Envisioning Asia: On Location, Travel, and the Cinematic Geography of U.S. Orientalism (University of Michigan Press, 2010) addresses how films function as a form of virtual travel and a source of knowledge of cultural difference. The book demonstrates that at critical moments in the 20th-century trajectory of US-Asia engagements cinema served as a mechanism of global positioning, a means of pinpointing the place of the “Far East” in order to situate the United States in the world.  Other cinema studies articles include “Fake Weddings and the Critique of Marriage: The Wedding Banquet (1993), I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007), and the Marriage Equality Debate,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2014) and “Feeling Moved: Racial Embodiment, Emotion, and Asian American Spectatorship,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media No. 57 (2016).

Dr. Roan's current research is in the area of comics studies.  Her ongoing book project is a study of graphic novels and comics using visual studies theories and methodologies, with a particular emphasis on Asian American comics creators and representations of racial identity.  Her comics studies publications include “Tasting is Knowing: The Aesthetics and Politics of Disgust in John Layman’s and Rob Guillory’s Chew” in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2017), a co-authored essay, with Dr. Monica Chiu, on "Asian American Graphic Narratives" that was commissioned by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2018), and most recently, "What is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies" in Seeing Comics Through Art History: Alternative Approaches to the Form (2022) and "Bitch Planet's Meiko Maki is Down for Justice!" in Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (2022).

In the summer of 2011 Dr. Roan was one of fifteen Fellows invited to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Stone Summer Theory Institute on the theme “Farewell to Visual Studies.” Here in the Bay Area she looks forward each year to attending the Center for Asian American Media’s CAAMFest, and in 2009 she was honored to serve as a member of the jury for Best Narrative Film.  In January 2022 she became an Associate Editor of INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society.

Prior to coming to CCA Dr. Roan was the 2008–9 Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Humanities at Grinnell College.  She has also been an Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at George Mason University, and a Minority Scholar-in-Residence at Oberlin College.

BA, Brown University; MA, PhD, University of Rochester

CINDY ROSE BELLO, PHD

Senior Adjunct, Critical Studies Program

Cindy Rose Bello received her PhD in History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California - Santa Cruz. Before coming to CCA, she held a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include hemispheric cultural studies; critical theories of decoloniality, feminism, performance, and aesthetics; and human rights and memory studies. Courses she has taught at CCA include: Histories and Theories of Performance; Feminist Art; Latin American Art; Visual Culture and Global Crisis; Introduction to the Modern Arts; and Introduction to Visual Studies.

Glen Helfand, MFA

Associate Professor, Graduate Fine Arts Program

Glen Helfand is a writer, critic, and curator. His writing about art, culture, and design have appeared in Artforum, Aperture, The Guardian, Photograph, SFMOMA Open Space, W, and many other publications and exhibition catalogs. Glen has organized exhibitions for the de Young Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Mills College Art Museum, Art Toronto, and numerous alternative and commercial galleries. In his work he explores art’s role within popular culture, conceptual strategies, emotional capacity, and California as location. Born in Los Angeles, he currently lives in Oakland, CA.

BA, San Francisco State University

MFA, Creative Writing, UC Riverside

Michael Washington, PHD

Adjunct II Professor, Critical Studies Program

Michael Washington completed his PhD in Continental philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University in 2018. He teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CCA, and is currently at work on a book project that is interested in narrating a cultural history of black feminist criticism.

Drawing on his PhD research (that focused on the philosophical trends within literary and cultural theory of the 1970s and 1980’s), his current book project is interested in the ways several black women literary and cultural theorists (Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Adrian Piper, among others) developed a counterintuitive and idiosyncratic culture of criticism and theory building that we are still coming to terms with and learning from today.