Research & Project Development

Carissa Garcia is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and arts administration consultant

who has 10 years of wide-ranging non-profit experience as a Teaching Artist, Program Facilitator, Program Director, Executive Director, Director of Strategy and Development and a member of the Board of Trustees in numerous organizations in Fresno and Los Angeles. She has managed projects ranging from film production and community engagement, to the production of murals, to large-scale exhibitions funded by sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Cal Humanities, California Arts Council, the James Irvine Foundation, Sierra Health, and the California Endowment, in addition to numerous corporate and individual funding sources.

She considers herself a “greñuda filmmaker,” working on untamed methods of documenting and reversing erasure as a decolonial means of creating and recuperating knowledge. As a Eugene Cota Robles fellow at UCLA, she worked for four years on a doctoral degree and currently holds a Masters of Arts degree in Chicana and Chicano Studies with an emphasis in expressive arts. While under the mentorship of Judy Baca at the Social and Public Art Resource Center’s Digital Mural Lab, she was trained in Public Art and Community Cultural Development. She is currently working on a publication about the erased histories of Chicanx muralism throughout Fresno County and an anthology centering methods of art production and aesthetics of the Central Valley.