CCA faculty lead their fields and earn top honors and fellowships

CCA proudly commends our award-winning faculty who are transforming their practices across the fine arts, design, architecture, and humanities and sciences. They stand out in their fields for taking creative risks and mentoring the next generation of students and creatives.

We congratulate the latest group of faculty members who have earned these impressive national awards and fellowships in 2023–24.

Two faculty members were named as finalists for the renowned SECA Art Award. Angela Hennessy, professor of Textiles, and Lauren D’Amato, faculty member in Illustration were among 16 Bay Area artists named by SFMOMA to recognize talented artists “whose work, at the time of nomination, has not received substantial recognition from a major institution.”

The three most recent Artadia Award recipients from the Bay Area are Heesoo Kwon, assistant professor of Animation, Ranu Mukherjee, chair of Film, and Sofía Córdova, faculty, MFA Film. Artadia is a nonprofit grantmaker and nationwide community of visual artists, curators, and patrons, elevating the careers of artists at pivotal moments in their practice.

This past year, Neal Schwartz, professor of Architecture, and his firm S^A received an American Architecture Honor Award from the Chicago Athenaeum in the category Private Houses for the project called “Mourning Dovecote,” as well as five additional Honorable Mentions from the American Architecture Award 2023.

Neeraj Bhatia, associate professor of Architecture, recently earned the Architectural League’s prestigious Emerging Voices award for 2024. “The work of each Emerging Voice represents the best of its kind and addresses larger issues within architecture, landscape, and the built environment,” according to the Architectural League.

Bhatia also was awarded with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) 2024 Faculty Design Award, and together with Antje Steinmuller, chair of Architecture, the 2024 ACSA Creative Achievement Award for their project “Making Space for Community—Learning from Collective Living as a Basis for Designing Policy.”

An additional and previously unmentioned architecture award also went to Negar Kalantar, associate professor of Interior Design and Alireza Borhani Haghighi, Architecture faculty, for their project “The Sound of Kerfing” for which they received the 2022 ACADIA Best Paper Award Runner-Up.

MFA Writing faculty Dodie Bellamy was named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow for General Nonfiction. These fellowships are awarded to mid-career individuals who have demonstrated exceptional creative ability in the arts and a great promise for their future endeavors.

Faith Adiele, chair and professor, Writing and Literature, was also recognized for her elegant prose. She won first prize at the San Francisco Press Club for an article in Smithsonian Folklife covering Oakland’s street murals and the role of Black art in protest movements. She was also nominated for “best writing about race” by the Los Angeles Press Club for the Alta Magazine profile of CCA alum Lava Thomas.

The College Art Association of America (CAA) recently announced Maria Porges, professor, MFA Fine Arts, as the recipient of the 2024 CAA Distinguished Teaching of Art Award for transcending the boundaries of her discipline and contributing to the profession as a whole and to the world at large. By honoring outstanding member achievements, “CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standard of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts.”

Also in spring 2024, Janette Kim, associate professor of Architecture, was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. During her fellowship, Kim is working on her forthcoming book on the decommodification of property ownership. MacDowell Fellowships offer talented individuals an inspiring residential environment in which to produce enduring works.

Kim also received the 2024 Arnold W. Brunner Grant for Architectural Research from AIA New York and the Center for Architecture for her forthcoming book and research project, Property Playbook, which illustrates how activists and architects can work together to co-opt property law and foster a just and ecologically vibrant built environment.

Chair of Photography Aspen Mays has been named an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Artists selected for this program are at all career stages and work in all media. The program supports artists in their exploration and experimentation in order to take their work to the next level.

Other faculty leading their respective fields include Curtis Arima, chair of Jewelry and Metal Arts, who was the keynote speaker delivering the McKinney Visiting Artist Lecture at the Radical Jewelry Makeover: Midwest Edition symposium at the Indiana University Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Bloomington, Indiana, on January 19, 2024.

Anthea Black, chair of BFA Printmedia, curated The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artists’ Book at Kala Art Institute and Gallery in Berkeley, CA, with funding in part by the IFPDA Foundation and by Mary E. Black Gallery, Halifax, Canada through a Halifax Regional Arts grant. The exhibition's title publication is supported by Women’s Studio Workshop’s Research Residency Award, and will be released later in the year.

We also congratulate former faculty who are making high profile appearances: Dionne Lee, alum (MFA Fine Arts 2017) and former mentored teaching fellow/faculty in Photography will show in the Whitney Biennial 2024. And Jeffrey Gibson (former CCA faculty) will represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale.

Congratulations to all of our visionary faculty!

Published on February 19, 2024