Join us in welcoming and celebrating 2023-2024 Media Arts Fellows and Jen Cole Artist-In-Residence Award Recipient!

We're excited to announce our latest cohort of Media Arts Fellows - Chia Amisola, Charles Lee, Amy Elkins and Shantré Pinkney. They will have up to 9 months unlimited access to Kala's facilities, a $3,000 stipend, one free Kala class or workshop, and a culminating group exhibition with the 2023-2024 Fellowship and Media Arts Cohort in the Kala Gallery.

The 2023/24 Media Arts selection committee included Kala’s Artistic Director and Co-Director Mayumi Hamanaka; Diego Villalobos Assistant Curator, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; and Media Fellowship alumni Esy Casey.

We also want to welcome Giana Montero, the second annual recipient of the Jen Cole Artist-In-Residence award in memory of beloved Kala artist and teacher Jen Cole. This opportunity is for a local printmaker to come to Kala for an artist residency with a small stipend for supplies. This award is meant to support an artist who is at a pivotal point in their practice, needs support financially or in other ways, and for whom this opportunity will be transformative creatively.

A special thanks to the supporters of the Media Arts Fellowship program including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bernard Osher Foundation, and The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and to all who contributed to the Jen Cole AIR award.

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2023-2024 Media Arts Fellows

Chia Amisola (b. 2000) is an internet & ambient artist from Manila, Philippines. Through 'internet ambient', their work is situated in the internet's ecologies (and thus, its invisibles & systems): in the website as material to construct worlds, tools, & environments; in ambience's politics of visibility, defaults, and infrastructures—to make an internet where we can be heard. Their (web)site-specific art investigates technology's love, labor, and liberation, supposing creation as synonymous with liberation. They graduated with a BA in Computing & the Arts with distinction from Yale University in 2022, receiving the Sudler Prize for the creative arts.

Charles Lee (b. 1983, Honolulu) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, researcher, and storyteller whose work exploits the fissures in the versions of U.S. history that we have been taught. His work confronts the fallacy of U.S. iconography and encourages critical dialogue questioning the origins of American myths, the obfuscation of Black cultural creators and innovators from the historical archive and empowers Black viewers with a more accurate depiction of their histories, and encourages the building of future histories. The stories offer insight into the notion of what it means to be a Black American today.

Amy Elkins is a research-based visual artist in the Bay Area. She works in photography, installation, and sculpture. Most recently Elkins' work pivots to include explorations of her family's deeply rooted and complex history in Southern California as an 8th generation born on Tongva/ Gabrielino land in the greater Los Angeles. These examinations are done using family archives, historical documents, and early Alta California maps to trace the land loss, assimilation, and resilience of Indigenous and Chicanx ancestors for a project titled A Place Where We Are In The Sun.

Shantré Pinkney Inspired by hip-hop, jazz, and French New Wave cinema, Shantré began her creative venture in New York and studied film-making in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. As a lover of non-traditional and inquisitive stories, she seeks to raise dialogue between art and the audience. She creates in the mediums of photography, film, spoken word, commercials, and web tv. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and available to travel domestically and internationally.

Jen Cole Artist-In-Residence Award

In celebration of the work and legacy of beloved artist Jen Cole, Beth Fein and Kala’s community of artists have come together to create an annual Artist-In-Residence (AIR) award in Jen’s name.

This year the recipient of the Jen Cole AIR award is Giana Montero who will join Kala in November for a two-month artist residency. Giana's work strives to convey the joy of simple pleasures through various printmaking techniques, primarily etching. She takes inspiration for her creative pursuits from her foster dogs who stop to smell the flowers. She is a Costa Rican native and received her BSE from the University of Pennsylvania. Giana currently resides in Oakland, California. Welcome, Giana!