2025 Cohort

Mame Marieme LO is a French-Senegalese visual artist and social worker based in the Bay Area. Her mixed-media work explores Blackness, lineage, and resilience through painting, animation, and digital art. Drawing from personal and collective histories, she creates polyform ancestors and reimagines erased narratives. Her practice began as a personal ritual and evolved into a tool for healing and connection. She has exhibited in France, Switzerland, and the U.S., and facilitates community workshops centered on art, care, and resistance. Her work blends traditional techniques with digital archives to transform cycles of trauma into spaces of reflection and strength. 

Headshot Credit: Iris Zimmermann

Fateme Mokhles is an artist who enjoys expressing their true feelings through various mediums, including painting, digital illustrations, animation, performance, and occasionally, very long naps. Born in 1997 in Iran, they now live in California, exploring life with the wide-eyed wonder of a very curious newborn. Fateme illustrates children’s books, including “Rostam’s Picture-Day Pusteen” (Charlesbridge, 2024) and “My America Blooms” (Beaming Books, coming Winter 2026). They are also working on their first early reader graphic novel. When not creating art, Fateme can be found dancing, singing, cracking dad jokes, and trying to understand adults.

Roger Kim is an interdisciplinary artist and musician whose work explores the relationships between diaspora, tradition, trauma, and belonging. Roger studied music and art at UC Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and traditional Korean music with Ji Soonja in South Korea. He has received recognition and support from Vermont Studio Center, ICA San Francisco, Broken Pencil Magazine, YBCA New Frequencies Festival, CultureHub LA, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Roger publishes puri zine about Korean history, is the founder of Kkiri Kkiri Samulnori, and facilitates workshops with Hwa Records collective.

Headshot Credit: Natia Ser

Mona Wang is a visual artist based in Oakland whose work re-imagines the tensions at the boundaries of cultures to create something new, especially around diasporic communities. She studies traditional Chinese and Arabic calligraphy, and previously led the design and construction of Loss in Translation, a large-scale multilingual sound-art installation housed in a large wooden hulu.

Kelly To is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Oakland, California, to a family of Vietnamese refugees. Their work spans printmaking, digital, and traditional mediums, exploring identity, memory, and cultural heritage through bold colors and personal narratives. Influenced by childhood experiences and diasporic resilience, Kelly’s art balances playful vibrancy with deeper introspection. They hold a B.A. in Art from UC Santa Barbara, where they refined their interdisciplinary approach.

Kate Goka (b. 1971, St. Louis) is an artist living in Brisbane, California. A long-time educator, she spent decades as a teacher, small school founder, administrator, new teacher coach, and homeschool parent. Her art practice starts with experimentation and includes works on paper, sculptural work, papermaking, and installation. In her pieces, folk crafts meet fine art practices and materiality creates layers of meaning from our everyday lives.

Jackie Romero (she/her) is a Palestinian and Mexican artist born and raised in Yelamu aka San Francisco, CA. Jackie is a community organizer and visual artist whose work reflects the relationship between people and land. She paints, makes prints and continues the centuries old practice of tatreez (Palestinian embroidery). Her practice is rooted in art’s historical role as a safeguard of cultural identity, political unity and revolutionary struggle.

Martin Rodriguez Serrano (b. 2001, Quito, Ecuador) is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, and installation. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, his work explores the complexities of identity, memory, and cultural hybridity through layers, color, and erasure. Engaging with themes of syncretism and symbolic fragmentation, he reconfigures personal and historical narratives into composite forms. He has exhibited at the Worth Ryder Gallery and studied in Florence, Italy, and the College of Marin. Rodriguez Serrano is currently completing his BA in Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, and lives and works in Berkeley, California.