Activist | Artist in Residence (AAIR)
Above Image: Installation view of the 2023-34 Activist Artist-in-Residence exhibition, Rebecca Ustrell: Permanence, at Hinshaw Gallery, February 29 – March 28, 2024. This exhibition is organized by Pitzer College Art Galleries and the Community Engagement Center. Photo: Christopher Wormald.
The Community Engagement Center and Pitzer Art Galleries invites one local activist-artist per academic year for the purpose of promoting interdisciplinary platforms of exchange—through facilitating dialogue, sharing knowledge and skills, and generating impactful experiences—throughout the Pitzer at large. Expected AAIR activities will include: creative and pedagogic engagement between an artist | activist and the Pitzer Community, collaboration with partners on campus (students, staff, and faculty), and community partners in the field, and acting as a resource for partnered academic courses at the college.
Artist | Activist in Residence
Cienna Benn | 2025-2026
Cienna Benn is an archival practitioner, writer, and cultural worker inspired by matters of identity and image-making. Through her work, Cienna cares for aesthetic sensibilities by lifting the collections of visual artists and art movements, ranging from acts of self-fashioning to social activism; personal and culturally situated. Born and raised in Altadena, CA, Cienna's independent research considers the complexities of migration and intergenerational memory through the use of photography, oral history, and the production of digital media. Cienna is a recent graduate of Visual Studies from The University of California, Irvine, and is an Alumna of Howard University where she earned her bachelor's degrees in Sociology and Africana Studies. Cienna aims to express herself as a keeper of inherited information through accessibility, activation, and epistemologies of care.
Past Activist | Artists in Residence
Marvin James is an artist, educator, and strategist born and raised in Pomona, CA by way of American African migrations, from Coahoma County, Mississippi to West Side Chicago as well as Pine Bluff, Arkansas to South Central Los Angeles. He serves as the founding archive caretaker for ITS-IN-SCOPE, a collective learning and contemporary archiving practice empowering everyday people to remember intuition by contextualizing our shared histories and imagining new futures. His personal work as an artist-archivist weaves different materials together through an artistic approach akin to the scientific method, from design & printmaking, to film photography, poetics, installation, video, and sound, each medium provides another language for presenting research findings. As an educator and strategist, his practices flows from conceptual to tangible by making space for study around his research and making good on his worldbuilding ambitions by developing archive-informed systems for education, affordable housing, food production and land stewardship.
Rebecca Ustrell (she/her) is a Latinx Jewish artist, educator, journalist and documentarian in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. Ustrell founded Curious Publishing, a non-profit artbook publishing company that supports queer, BIPOC, and femme creatives through the
publication of limited edition art books, zines, and print collections, that uplifts the voices of marginalized artists residing throughout Southern California. In addition to her role at Curious Publishing, she teaches self-publishing and zine-making for teens and adults as well as holds public speaking engagements which drive community involvement in literary arts. Her work focuses on archiving Queer, BIPOC, and neurodivergent artist perspectives in relation to their communities.
Activist | Artist in Residence Support
- CEC Program Coordinator
- Academic Program Coordinator