Notable alumni

 

Teena Apeles (MFA 98) is a writer and editor. Her first book, Women Warriors: Adventures from History's Greatest Female Fighters, was published by Seal Press in 2004. She has contributed to numerous publications, including Audrey, BUST, Giant Robot, LA Weekly, SOMA, Pasadena Weekly, Filipinas and Woman This Month. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Father Poems (Anvil Publishing), Bare Your Soul: The Thinking Girl's Guide to Enlightenment (Seal Press) and Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 (Really Great Books).

Fulbright Fellow Laura Beloff (MFA 98) is a digital artist and photographer. She has presented her work at the Nordic Interactive Conference in Copenhagen, the Tech Media Biennial in Toronto, Electrohype 2002 in Malmö, Sweden, and SIGGRAPH.

Stacen Berg (MFA 03) is assistant to the director of the UCLA Hammer Museum and teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Multimedia artist Jason Brown (MFA 00) recently edited NTNTNT, a book of net.artifacts. He is also the research director of superbunker.com, the creator of blebnet.org, and a founding member of the cooperative media lab c-level. He is currently the technical coordinator for the CalArts School of Critical Studies.

Andrew Choate (MFA 03) is an artist, DJ and critic. His thesis project, a radio play called Pigs in a Blanket, was aired on German radio. He has presented his audio collage of found sound and language at the Beyond Text Festival held at Beyond Baroque in Venice. His criticism has appeared in the art journal D'Art.

Ken Ehrlich (MFA 99) and fellow Writing Program grad Brandon LaBelle co-edited Surface Tension: Problematics of Site, an anthology about site-specific artmaking. The accompanying CD features rarely heard works by Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Paul Panhuysen, Stuart Dempster, Terry Fox, Alison Knowles, Anthony Moore and undo. In connection with the release of the book, Ehrlich moderated a panel discussion at MOCA in Los Angeles and performed at the Dia:Chelsea Bookshop in New York.

Malik Gaines (MFA 99) is a playwright, art critic and curator. He curated the large-scale exhibition Fade (1990-2003) held at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at California State University Los Angeles and the Craft and Folk Art Museum. Featuring 50 artists, the show was the first installment of the three-part, yearlong exhibition African American Artists in Los Angeles, a historic survey presented by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Writer, actor, director and producer Joy Gregory (MFA 99) is a founding member of Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company. Following productions of her plays All Souls Day, Dreaming Lucia and My Life in Pop at Lookingglass, Gregory collaborated with Lookingglass member David Schwimmer in 2003 to adapt Studs Terkel's oral history Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. Gregory's play Last Wooden Rollercoaster in the Midwest was a finalist for the 2002 Humana Festival Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville while her CalArts thesis project, Dear Charlotte, received a Meritorious Playwriting Award at the 2000 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Her musical The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, developed through the A.S.K. Theater Projects Unsettled Scores Program and the New Works Initiative at Theatreworks in Palo Alto, premiered in 2003 at the Powerhouse Theatre Company in Santa Monica. Gregory has also written for the TV shows Felicity and Joan of Arcadia.

Liz Hansen (MFA 00) is editor of the Los Angeles literary journal Scoop. She is also a contributor to The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.

Jeremy Hight (MFA 98), Jeff Knowlton (MFA 99) and School of Art grad Naomi Spellman created 34 North 118 West, an interactive work located at 34n118w.net. The project is a Global Positioning System-guided tour of the century-old railroad district in Los Angeles. It received the Bernay Kurland Grayson Award for Creative Excellence at the Art in Motion Festival at USC, and was featured in the 2003 edition of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. The project has received press in Wired, NPR and The Washington Post, among other media outlets.

Steve Kandell (MFA 99) is a playwright and journalist. His reviews and articles have appeared in Maxim and Salon.com, among other publications.

Artist, writer and curator Soo Kim (MFA 95), a member of the MFA Writing Program's first graduating class, has presented her photography at galleries and museums worldwide. Her work was featured in the exhibition Koreamericakorea at Artsonje Center in Seoul. She teaches photography at Otis College of Art and Design and Loyola Marymount University. She is on the editorial board of the art magazine Xtra and the curatorial board of Spanish Kitchen.

Fiction by Cheryl Klein (MFA 02) has appeared in Blythe House Quarterly, The Absinthe Literary Review, CrossConnect, Delirium Journal and Doorknobs & Bodypaint.

Writer and music reviewer Steve Knezevich (MFA 96) is a programmer at Rockstar Games. He was one of the developers of the groundbreaking video game Grand Theft Auto.

Brandon LaBelle (MFA 98) is a sound artist and writer. His sound-performance and installation works have been featured in exhibitions such as Bitstreams at the Whitney Museum; Amplitude of Chance at Kawasaki City Museum; and Sound as Media at the ICC in Tokyo. He has also presented work at the 9th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Liverpool and Manchester; the Sampling Rage Festival in Berlin; the ICA in London, the Experimental Intermedia Performance Series in New York; and the Arizona State University Art Museum. LaBelle is co-editor of the volumes Site of Sound: of Architecture and The Ear, Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language, and Surface Tension: Problematics of Site-all published by Errant Bodies Press.

Felicia Luna Lemus (MFA 00) is the author of the novel Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2003.The San Francisco Chronicle called the coming-of-age story "delightfully inventive" and "bursting at the seams with pizzazz." The book was Lemus' thesis project at CalArts.

Writer and composer Karl Montevirgen (MFA 00) is currently the Program Manager for Young Musicians Programs at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  He was associate director of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Composers Forum.  Karl has had his music performed at Line Space Line, Dangerous Curve, and the Earjam Music Festivals.  He is devoting himself full time to composition.

Christopher Okum (MFA 99) scripted Alphawave, a feature film directed by Carl Colpaert and produced by Cineville Inc. in 2002.

Andrea Richards (MFA 99) is the author of Girl Director: A How-To Guide for the First-Time, Flat-Broke Film & Video Maker, published in 2001 by 17th Street Press. She is the senior editor at Girl Press and also edits for Angel City Press. Richards has written for Attaché, Bitch, BUST, SOMA and L.A. Weekly.

Writer, freelance curator and documentary filmmaker Denise Spampinato (MFA 02) is a visiting faculty member at the UCLA Department of Art and teaches writing at Otis College of Art and Design. In 1998, she and the Cortical Foundation curated Beyond the Pink, a performance art festival presented in parallel to the MOCA survey Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979. Beyond the Pink featured performances at the Barnsdall Art Park Gallery Theater and Bergamot Station, and film screenings at Art Center College of Art and Design. Spampinato is the editor of Pictionary Fictionary: Selected Writings of Gunter Brus, a volume published recently by Green Integer Books.

Brad Spence (MFA 96) is an artist, educator, writer and curator. He curated the first U.S. retrospective of the work of legendary early-1970s conceptual and performance artist Bas Jan Ader. The show opened at UC Irvine in 1999 and traveled to UC Santa Cruz and UC Riverside. Spence also wrote the title essay for the exhibition catalogue. His own artwork, reviewed in ArtForum, Xtra and other journals, has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including Other Paintings at the Huntington Beach Art Center, Under the Influence: New Art from L.A. at the H & R Block Artspace in Kansas City, and Color me mine at LACE in Los Angeles.

Freyda Thomas (MFA 01) is an actor, playwright and translator who earned her MFA from CalArts at 56. Her thesis play, The Gamester, an adaptation of a 1696 comedy of manners by Jean-Francois Regnard, received its world premiere in the spring of 2001 at the Northlight Theatre in Chicago. Earlier, in 2000, the work had been a finalist for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Thomas has also translated and adapted Molière's The Learned Ladies, which premiered off-Broadway in 1991 and starred Jean Stapleton. Her other works include Tartuffe Born Again, a modern verse adaptation of Molière's most famous work; The Heir Transparent, modeled after another Regnard comedy; and an adaptation of Goldoni's romp The Mistress of the Inn. She has also scripted the original musical fable The Creature Concert.

Freelance journalist Andrew Vontz (MFA 99) is based in Los Angeles. Formerly an editor at the magazine Mountain Biking, he has written for Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Velonews, Bicycling, Big Brother Skateboarding, Men's Journal, Premiere, Maxim, Slate and 3 AM. His is working on a book about electronic music