Mentorship

Mentor

Claire Correo Nettleton, PhD, is a curator, author, and professor who specializes in the intersection of art, science, and ecology from the nineteenth-century to today. Her exhibitions, publications, and numerous art-science colloquia bring together artists, researchers, and the public to engage with questions about technology and biotechnology, ethics, the environment, and the role of the arts and humanities today. She is the co-editor of Art and Biotechnology: Viral Culture from CRISPR to COVID (Bloomsbury, 2024) and author of The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She has curated interdisciplinary exhibitions and colloquia which examine creative human and nonhuman collaborations, such as Parisian Ecologies: A City Transformed in Nineteenth-Century French Prints and Drawings at the University of San Diego (2024), and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College (2022), where she previously served as Academic Curator and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pomona, Scripps and Harvey Mudd colleges. She currently teaches at UC Riverside, lectures widely at institutions such as Cal Arts and the University of San Diego, and served on the campus partners committee for the Getty PST Art & Science Collide (2024).

Mentor

Andi Campognone has over 30 years experience as an arts and culture advocate and leader in the western region of the United States. As the owner/director of Andi Campognone Projects she has been driving strategic growth and fostering collaboration for artists, museums, creative businesses, and municipalities. Her private consulting organization focuses on promoting arts and culture through museum quality projects that include the production of books, films, traveling exhibitions, community engagement, and public policy. Campognone is the Founding Director of Kipaipai Professional Development Workshops, which includes her online class GET SHOWN, encouraging artists in building strong strategies for their creative practices. 

Previously, she was contracted to build, program, and open the Museum of Art and History (MOAH) in Lancaster, California and subsequently served the community as Manager of Arts and Museums for the City of Lancaster for over a decade. She has served as Cultural Arts Commissioner for the City of Pomona, California where she contributed to the writing and adoption of Pomona’s Cultural Arts Master Plan and Art in Public Places Policy. Campognone has served on the Board of the Holualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture and as interim Executive Director of the Donkey Mill Art Center in Holualoa, Hawai’i. She is currently contracted as a consulting mentor for the Bakersfield Museum of Art, is a grant panelist for Los Angeles County Arts Commission and California Community Foundation, and serves as a Director on the Tehachapi Arts Commission. She continues curating through independent projects and supports ArTTable as a member since 2007.

Art Advocate

Rotem Rozental, Ph.D, is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Between 2016-2022, she served as Chief Curator at American Jewish University, where she was also Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Programming. Rotem is a lecturer at USC Roski School of Art and Design Critical Studies Department, and she mentors artists worldwide. Recent curatorial projects include the group exhibitions If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision (Brand Library and Art Center, 2023-2024), Expand and Contract: Photography andMixed Media (LACP, 2024) and Anything Can Happen at Any Second: Images, Imaginations and the American West (Laemmle Royal, 2024-2025).

Rotem contributes regularly to magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues. She edited and contributed to Shay Zilberman’s artist book Itinerarium (2023), and her own monograph, Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement (Routledge, 2023), received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies.

Mentor

Claudia Pretelin is a Mexican independent curator & producer based in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Communications, as well as both an M.A. & a Ph.D. in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).Claudia has delivered lectures in Mexico, Argentina, & the US, & has conducted research while organizing exhibitions and events at various art museums and galleries in Mexico & the US. She has previously worked in art studios as a personal assistant to renowned artists Graciela Iturbide & Gary Baseman.

In 2015, she founded www.instrumentsofmemory.com, an online platform that documents conversations with women in the arts, aimed at promoting the work of women from diverse backgrounds. Through this platform, she has organized exhibitions such as "Instruments of Memory" (2022) and co-curated "Memorias y Resistencias: Historias Afrolatinas y Caribeñas" (2024) in partnership w/ the Museo de las Mujeres in Costa Rica. Currently, she is co-curating "Natura Naturata" w/ Julieta Pestarino, which is scheduled to open in 2026 at Descanso Gardens in Pasadena, California.

Mentor

Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator in Los Angeles. In 2024 they were co-curator of the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial: ablaze with our care, its ongoing song and the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption at UCLA Art Sci Center. Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. Their latest book is Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023), using speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. Vikram has held curatorial roles at institutions throughout California and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Art at UCLA.

Mentor

Lucia Fabio is an independent curator and researcher whose interests include notions of domesticity, alternative spaces and histories, and the wonder of the everyday. She was part of the curatorial team that organized The Feminist Art Program (1970-1975): Cycles of Collectivity at REDCAT. She worked on the first museum retrospective of Fluxus artist Alison Knowles which opened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2022.

Mentor

Nica Aquino is a visual artist, curator & cultural producer living and working in Northeast Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Photography from the Pacific Northwest College of Art & MA in Contemporary Visual Culture from the Manchester School of Art. She primarily works in 35mm film and occasionally experiments with various multimedia ranging from video & sound, installation, textile & fibres. She is the founder and director of Mata Art Gallery, an alternative gallery project, and has a full-time day job as a public art administrator. Learn more about her projects at nicaaquino.com and https://www.mataartgallery.org/ or follow her on Instagram at @nica_aquino and @mata.art.gallery

Mentor

Danielle Sommer is a Los Angeles-based museum professional specializing in art and cultural exhibitions, as well as co-creation and community engagement. She currently works with the USC Fisher Museum as a curator. Past experience includes Natural History Museum, Craft Contemporary, and the Getty.

Mentor

Claudia Huiza, a native of El Salvador, is an LA-based artist, educator, writer, and activist. For over 25 years, she has launched initiatives for positive social change.  This includes a variety of transcultural collaborations including "Trans-Culturation/Trans-Polinación, Arte de San Diego y Tijuana" funded by the American Festival Project Grant for the Arts, sponsored by the Getty Fund.  

Mentor

Emma Gray is a contemporary artist, curator, and gallerist known for her significant contributions to the Los Angeles art scene.

She has been influential both via her personal art practice and her role in promoting other artists.  Emma has been privately mentoring and advising artists, some renowned in several creative fields . She combines her extensive knowledge in all aspects of the artworld and her education and experience in the meditation studio to mentor artists and creatives. She focuses  on helping  build careers and a sustainable  self-supporting life in the arts, centered around  well being, core values, principles and ethics.

Mentor

Kim Schoenstadt was born in Chicago, Il. and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BA from Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. Her work sits at the intersection of architecture and historical research, with a feminist bent. She is known for large-scale wall drawings that weave architecture and sculptural shapes together to tackle issues of constructed realities.

Mentor

Sarah Griffin is a Chicago native and LA local, Sarah, is an artist, a design junkie, a deep thinker, and a lover of all things beautiful. After realizing that many people want original art for their homes, but are daunted by the process of finding and/or affording it, Sarah founded the Art House Market, an art advisory service that focuses on interiors. Sarah who completed her undergraduate work at Stanford and graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania created Art House Market.

Mentor

Dominique Clayton is an arts consultant, writer, and gallerist born and raised in Los Angeles. Clayton is the founder of Dominique Gallery, a storefront turned pop-up exhibition and online program which showcases and advises emerging artists with a focus on marginalized artists and artists raising families. In addition to the gallery, Clayton also serves on the curatorial and programming committee of Destination Crenshaw, a forthcoming outdoor art museum and arts program based in the historic Crenshaw community of Los Angeles. Clayton previously worked as Manager of the Founding Director’s office at The Broad and later as an interim director at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Her arts writing has been featured in publications including Cultured Magazine, LALA Magazine, Artsy, Sugarcane Magazine, Blavity, and her own forthcoming Black Arts Diary.