Dr. Carianna Arredondo is an artist, educator, scholar, and administrator living and working in the Bay Area (Ohlone Land). Carianna has several years of experience supporting non-profit arts organizations, museums, artist-residency programs, and teaching at the college level. She currently works in administration for the School of Education at Mills College in Oakland, CA, alongside maintaining her professional practice as a freelance educator, mixed-media artist, and art education scholar. Her line of research focuses on community arts engagement--particularly how reciprocal learning is fostered between artists and communities through artist-in-residence programs. Her interdisciplinary art practice is a product of a process that negotiates language and material, guided by rituals that activate memories about identity, sexuality, and escapism.

Identity has always been a complex word in my vocabulary that I’ve struggled with defining. As a survivor of severe trauma, a daughter of two different cultures, and an individual that defied statistics by living past my early twenties, I often feel like an imposter, masking a part of my reality––and history––that burns deep in my chest. Creating has not only been a tool for healing, but a ritual of commemorating the self. My work serves as a testimony, that, without darkness, we do not see the light.

”I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.”

-Allen Ginsberg | An Eastern Ballad