Art School Faculty
Ileana Tejada
Ileana Tejada is a Mexican-American artist born and raised in Southern California. A former NCAA Division II Track and Field athlete, Tejada's work progressively deals with female masculinity and the opposition to "marianismo"-the exaggerated sense of traditional femininity. Tejada received her BFA from California State Polytechnic University- Pomona, as well as a BS (Kinesiology, Pedagogy). In 2015 she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art in Painting from San Francisco Art Institute. Tejada is the recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Graduate Fellowship, the Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Painting, and SFAI's Amir Esfahani Graduate Studio Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Gallery CB1 in Los Angeles, and published in New American Paintings, No.123, MFA Annual, 2016. She is currently working and living in San Francisco, CA.
Oscar Lopez Guerrero
Oscar was born and raised in Mexico City. It was here where he first came into contact with the art world in the Graffiti urban art scene. After immigrating to San Francisco, Bay area, he studied at Foothill College where his teachers, Jose Arenas and Joe Ragey, introduced him to the fine art world and encouraged him to go on to study at the Academy Art University. Oscar enjoys working in oil, pastel, charcoal and airbrush and other mediums. He is currently concentrating on portraits, still life’s and landscape paintings. Culture has a huge impact on the way each of us perceive the world, and he hopes to share that perspective with others through his artwork.
Bojana Rankovic
Bojana works on various personal and commissioned projects. While her work mostly consists of printmaking and bookmaking, these practices regularly transform themselves into larger installation works.
Born in Belgrade, Serbia, she moved to the United States in 2014, and in 2018 earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, with a major in printmaking and a minor in Art and Technology. Currently, in Brooklyn, Bojana had her work projected on the ZAZ10 Gallery billboard screen in Times Square, NY, has exhibited in American Bookbinders Museum, Root Division, 1890 Bryant Street Studios, Diego Rivera Gallery, Art Gallery at the Orinda Library, and various alternative spaces; as well as The Russian House, Glasnik Gallery, and Museum of History of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, Serbia.
Jeff Johnston
Jeff was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jeff doesn't much care for writing things in the third person... I began my passion in art with cartooning and animation. While attending the University of Tulsa, I was studying Graphic Design and stumbled onto a deep love of painting. My first solo exhibition was in 1998, and in 1999 I was fortunate enough to study painting with Oklahoma-based landscape painter Daniel Lang. I also was very lucky to have helped performance artist, James Luna with his Tulsa production of "In My Dreams: A Surreal, Post-Indian Subterranean Blues Experience in 1996. This piece informed me of performance art that incorporates humor. After college, I began my career as a Graphic Designer, which led me to Baltimore, Washington DC, Los Angeles and finally to San Francisco. All of these locations expanded my view and practice as a painter, but I also began incorporating performance elements into my work as a musician, sound artist, and stand-up comedian. I earned my MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, where all of my artistic elements coalesced into a single practice. I continue to work in film sound composition, painting, video, and occasionally performance.
Lauren Jade Szabo
Lauren Jade Szabo is a Los Angeles born artist who lives and works in Oakland, CA. She graduated with a BFA in Illustration from California College of the Arts with distinction, and received an MFA Fellowship from San Francisco Art Institute for graduate study in Painting, completed in 2018. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in private collections in Europe and the United States. Szabo currently exhibits with SFMOMA Artist's Gallery and teaches Painting in the public education department at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Steph Kudisch
Steph Kudisch is an artist, teacher, and art preparator in San Francisco. Focusing in screenprint, sound, and ceramics, Kudisch received their MFA as well as the Isaac M. Walter Sculpture Prize from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018. They were an Artist-in-Residence at In Cahoots Residency in 2020, as a member of the collective Hevra Kadisha. Kudisch teaches with the San Francisco Children’s Art Center’s Preschool For All initiative, where they teach printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and painting in schools throughout San Francisco. They are a member of the San Francisco Poster Syndicate, where they create and live-print screenprinted political posters.
Their artwork coaxes viewers to become participants, questioning assumptions and implicit bias about disability and queerness. They use mutability to reveal the worlds of indeterminacy that we dwell in, emphasizing the urgency of gathering spaces that foster discursive communities. In much of their work they reinterpret Jewish myth and ritual in the queer tradition of reimagining possibility.
Felicita Norris
Felicita Norris received her BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. Inspired by psychology, dreams, and pop culture, Norris has been drawing and painting for over 20 years. She is currently teaching drawing and painting at various Bay Area universities. She has exhibited at the Seattle Art Fair, Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Leeds College of Art in the United Kingdom and various venues in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Shiela Diolosa
Shiela Diolosa is owner and designer of San Francisco based MAE Leather Goods specializing in hand dyed leather accessories. Born in the Philippines and raised in Los Angeles, she moved to San Francisco to attend SFAI for Fine Art Painting. She incorporates her love of painting to create bold and unique leather accessories.
Tom Colcord
Tom Colcord is a painter and educator currently living in San Francisco California. His work explores the fluidity of perception and how memories, ideas and beliefs can morph over time. To achieve this he combines interior and exterior imagery, effectively creating a fractured yet dreamlike space, and then obscures large sections of it with patterning. This erasing and editing of the imagery reflects this fluidity in the subconscious and attempts to describe our incomplete understanding of the physical world around us.
He has an MFA in studio art from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from Indiana University Bloomington. He is originally from Indianapolis Indiana.
Amy M. Ho
Amy M. Ho builds video and spatial installations that bring attention to our existence as both physical and psychological beings. Amy completed her undergraduate degree in Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley and her MFA at Mills College in Oakland, CA. She was selected as a KQED Woman to Watch in 2017, received a Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Arts Grant in 2016 and a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artists Grant in 2013. Amy was included in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Bay Area Now 7 in 2014 and was a 2013 fellowship artist at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. She has previously exhibited at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA, the Walter and McBean Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, IL, and at the San Diego State University Downtown Art Gallery. Amy is an acting trustee at OUTPOST in Norwich, UK.
Jordan Holms
Jordan Holms is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in painting, sculpture, and textiles. Her work examines how spaces are materialized, organized, and made to mean. Holms has exhibited internationally in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada and her work is held in multiple private collections. Her work has been included in two solo exhibitions at Marrow Gallery, a group exhibition at the de Young Museum as well as with SFMOMA Artists Gallery, featured at BAMPFA, and in Adidas’s San Francisco Market Street storefront. Most recently, Holms was a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Artist Grant, where she was an artist-in-residence in February 2020. She is also a 2016-2019 recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute’s Graduate Fellowship Award. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Critical and Cultural Practices from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2015 and a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2019, where she graduated with honors. Holms lives and works in between San Francisco, California and Vancouver, Canada.
Mara Ramirez
Mara Ramirez is an artist, educator, and caretaker living and working in the Bay Area, California. They are a core founder of Freak Comics, an independent self-publishing Bay Area comics collective. Their comics are mainly autobiographical, and concern matters of intimacy, trauma, and healing. They play with abstraction, color, and the action of mark making as a means of distorting (and in doing so, clarifying) their own experiences through the filter of emotion and memory. These stories range in content: existentialism, gender, and mental illness are some of the topics that have emphasis.
Miles Stemp is a Canadian-American artist based in San Francisco California. He recently received his Masters of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art institute. Through his individual practice and collective works, he has participated in exhibitions and projects in Greece, Switzerland, the UK, and the US as well as extensively across Canada (Edmonton, Calgary, Chicoutimi, Owen Sound, St. Catharines, and Toronto). In 2016 his collective was awarded the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize. His work has been featured in critical journals such as Canadian Art, ESSE, C Magazine, and Border Crossings. Miles Stemp was a founding member of the Canadian art collective VSVSVS (vsvsvs.org).
Katherine Vetne
Originally from the East Coast, Katherine Vetne received a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of SFAI’s Graduate Fellowship in Painting as well as the Allen B. Stone Award. She has exhibited her work in Los Angeles (Angles Gallery; CB1 Gallery), Boston (Samson Projects, 808 Gallery), Washington, DC (National Museum of Women in the Arts) and San Francisco (Catharine Clark Gallery, 2nd floor projects). She lives and works in San Francisco.
Kate Laster
Kate Laster is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born and raised in Alaska from Utqiagvik to Juneau: place is tethered to her practice.
She received a Bachelor of Arts at Evergreen State College in 2015 and in 2019 she received a MA+MFA in History & Theory of Contemporary Art and Studio Art with an emphasis in Printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her thesis, GENTRIFICATION OF THE DEAD: How The Displacement Of Cemeteries Paved The Way For Rethinking Monuments In San Francisco, was a site specific practice of art-making and research. She has shown work in California, Washington, New Mexico, Alaska and Pennsylvania as well as internationally in Berlin and Osaka. She has taught Printmaking at the Tenderloin Boys & Girls Club through City Studio and was a teaching artist in residence at White Oaks-- she also currently teaches at the San Francisco Center for the Book.
She worked as Co-director of the Diego Rivera Gallery, a historic art space at 800 Chestnut Street where she facilitated weekly exhibitions. Laster has curated the Open Book sequence of exhibitions, including the most recent iterations at Root Division and Arion Press with an upcoming exhibit at Open Windows Cooperative. Laster has recently been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, In Cahoots, Open Windows and Cisco, Home of the Brave.
Collaboration is an essential heartbeat to Laster’s practice. She has worked with Woosh Kinaadeiyí, the SF Poster Syndicate, The Drag house: Palace of Trash, Resolana, and with her collaborator, Steph Kudisch as Hevra Kadisha (חֶבְרָה קַדִישָא).
Emily McPeek
Emily McPeek is a recent MFA graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute who works primarily in oil paint. While at SFAI Emily worked as a teaching assistant in the painting and drawing department. Emily received her BFA at USC and had the honor of working as an artists assistant for Kristin Calabreses, also an SFAI BFA graduate. Emily won first place for the Arts in Action: Momentum award sponsored by Volkswagen. The winning piece Women Praying was hung in the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. The Kennedy Center later requested two more paintings to show in the State Russian Museum.
Emily continues to paint and exhibit work in the bay area, most recently in San Juan Bautista, Los Gatos and San Francisco.
Kathy Sirico
Kathy Sirico is a Brooklyn-based visual artist working at the intersection of textiles, sculpture, painting, collage, and installation. Sirico (b. 1990, Philadelphia) holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Bachelor of Science from Skidmore College. She was a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center, a 2017 Artist-In-Residence at the Lucid Art Foundation, and a 2016 Artist-In-Residence at Recology. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including California, New York, and Chicago.
Rebecca Rippon
Rebecca Rippon is a San Francisco artist whose work explores the intersection of nature and constructed spaces. She works primarily in printmaking and brings an experimental approach to traditions in printmaking. She received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and was awarded a Cadogan Contemporary Art Award from the San Francisco Foundation. Rebecca teaches printmaking at the University of California Berkeley Art Studio and in San Francisco Art Institute’s Public Education department. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Xiao Wang
Xiao Wang is a Chinese artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland where he received his BFA degree in Painting and Printmaking. He continued his study at San Francisco Art Institute and earned his MFA degree in Painting.
Wang has shown internationally in Europe and the United States. His work has been featured in publications such as Hi-Fructose Magazine, Fresh Paint Magazine, and New American Paintings. Wang has also attended artist residency programs at MASS MoCA (MA), the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Root Division (CA) and Art Point (CA).