Sarah Williams

Co-Founder & Co-Director

Sarah Williams is a Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Feminist Center for Creative Work. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Sarah returned to the city in 2006 to attend USC’s Curatorial Practice in the Public Sphere M.A. program after receiving a B.A. in Art History from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since then she has been producing projects, exhibitions, programs, events and publications with ForYourArt, FCCW, CLOSING, and the Art Book Review.

Kamala Puligandla

Co-Director

Kamala Puligandla is a writer of autobiographical fiction and essays, on queer love, friendship and futures. She has earned degrees in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and UC Riverside, and is the author of two books, Zigzags (Not A Cult, 2020) and her novella, You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone (Co-Conspirator Press, 2021).  Kamala has many years of experience working as a copywriter and content strategist at tech companies, and was the Editor-in-Chief at the lesbian culture site Autostraddle.com, before coming to Feminist Center for Creative Work. She is the one sending you Feminist Center for Creative Work emails, so you know how to get involved in the many great opportunities here!

Samantha Alexis Manuel

Programming & Operations Coordinator

Samantha Alexis Manuel (she/siya) is a cultural worker whose curatorial practice centers experimental formats and community-driven approaches. She fosters generative, collaborative relationships with artists — emphasizing care, dialogue, and co-thinking over content extraction. At UCLA, she curated In Discrete Fashion: Garment Workers of LA, the first VR exhibition presented at Undergraduate Research Week (2023), exploring labor injustices in fashion. She has held roles at Arts for LA, LACMA, LACE, and the Getty, where she coordinated Our Voices, Our Getty, the institution’s first exhibition featuring texts by interns. Samantha currently works part-time as a Curatorial Assistant at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, where she recently curated Suhn Lee: Memento Mori, the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition.

Sundhya Anthony

Graphic Designer

Sundhya (pronounced sund·yah) is a Black and Sri Lankan graphic designer based in Los Angeles. They received their BFA in Graphic Design from California Institute of the Arts. They are a recipient of the AIGA Worldstudio award, and have received recognition from Reed college.

Sundhya also works at Polymode, and sometimes they play Fortnite Festival. They have designed brand identities, social media campaigns, publications, and photo-based illustrations for clients such as BIPOC Design History, The Vera List Center, Rizzoli, and Fisk Projects.

They grew up in Kentucky; where visual culture is a mix of folk, “low” culture, and surprises. They understand the value and, beauty that comes from vernacular. Living in Los Angeles has changed the type of vernacular that they take in. Storefront signage, graffiti, billboards, and other ubiquitous graphics made for everyday people inspire their practice currently.

Aandrea Stang

Board Chair

Aandrea Stang is an educator and curator/producer specializing in contemporary and socially engaged art practices. She is Director of the University Art Gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where she serves on the Art and Design Department faculty and is chair of the Women’s Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies Department. She was co-director of the University Art Gallery’s Getty PST ART project Brackish Water Los Angeles. Throughout her career, Stang has focused on institutional program development, creating and launching contemporary art and art education programs for diverse audiences at major cultural organizations, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Occidental College, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Known for her innovative programming and cross-institutional collaborations, she led MOCA’s Engagement Party (2008–2012), a pioneering initiative supporting new work by emerging artists, and was the founding director of Occidental College’s Oxy Arts program.

Carolina Ibarra-Mendoza

Secretary

Carolina Ibarra-Mendoza (she/her) is a Chicana intersectional feminist, creative strategist, and graphic designer dedicated to using design as a tool for storytelling, community empowerment, and social change. She collaborates with artists, activists, and organizations to challenge dominant narratives and build more inclusive visual landscapes.

Jia Yi Gu

Jia Yi Gu is one-half of Spinagu, an architecture practice working across building, research, publishing, and cultural organizing, founded with Maxi Spina. Spinagu approaches design and research as a mode of critical inquiry, cultivating spaces for exchange and experimentation across built projects, institutions, exhibitions, books, furniture, and workshops—with priorities that include systems repair for the field of architecture, rebuilding material systems toward regenerative models, and advocating for equitable housing.

Gu is also a Los Angeles-based architectural historian, curator, and designer, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvey Mudd College. Her research examines materials as sites of knowledge production in twentieth-century architecture. She previously directed two Los Angeles institutions, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and Materials & Applications, and in 2024 co-curated the Getty PST ART project Material Acts. She is co-curator of Unknowing Los Angeles, a history of postmodern Los Angeles architecture, and a Board member of the Feminist Center for Creative Work. Her work has been supported by the NEA, Getty Foundation, Graham Foundation, and Canadian Center for Architecture.

Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson is the award-winning author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us (2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). She is the Barbra Streisand Professor of Contemporary Gender Studies, and Professor of English, gender and sexuality studies, and American studies & ethnicity at USC, where she also directs the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in Slate, Eater, NPR, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly, and KCRW’s Good Food among other venues. In 2019, she received the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction.  She co-hosts the podcasts The Gaymazing Race (a queer take on The Amazing Race) with Nicole J. Georges, and The Art of Grief with Dr. Megan Auster-Rosen.

Jessica Simmons-Reid

Jessica Simmons-Reid (she / her) is a writer, critic, and artist based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. Her criticism engages with contemporary art at the intersection of the political, the mythological, and the material, attending especially to feminist and somatic practices, ecological thought, and the poetics of language and form. Her writing appears in Artforum, Frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, T Magazine / The New York Times, Momus, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla). She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Brown University and has worked in the curatorial departments at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2024, she received an Incentive Prize for Young Art Critics from AICA, the International Association of Art Critics.

Tiffany Barber

Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is an award-winning scholar, curator, and critic whose work reshapes how we understand race, gender, and representation. A sought-after voice in contemporary art, culture, and fashion, her expert commentary spans academic journals, museum exhibitions, acclaimed documentaries, and major media outlets like The Nation, Huffington Post, Frieze, and Tate Etc. Currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at UCLA, Dr. Barber’s unique blend of art history, performance theory, and Black feminist thought inspires diverse audiences and institutions to advance new cultural futures. Her accolades include the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize; leadership roles at the International Journal of Surrealism, the Delaware Contemporary, the College Board, and the Black Speculative Arts Movement; and numerous fellowships. Her path-breaking exhibitions have been featured in Essence, The Brooklyn Rail, Surface Magazine, and Google Arts and Culture. Her debut monograph, Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (NYU Press, 2025), cements her reputation as a leading tastemaker and thinker of this generation.

Lia Halloran

Lia Halloran is an artist and educator whose work recovers the overlooked histories of women and queer people in astronomy, aviation, and other male-dominated fields of science and discovery. Working across painting, photography, video, and cyanotypes, she combines deep archival research with embodied experience to explore time, space, identity, and representation. Her subjects range from astrophysics and flight to crystal formation, cabinets of curiosities, and skateboarding, and her work moves between the intimate scale of the body and the vastness of the universe.

She co-authored The Warped Side of Our Universe (Liveright/Norton, 2023) with Nobel laureate Kip Thorne. Halloran’s is a recipient of a C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts Artworks grant, and the Caltech-Huntington Fellowship in Visual Culture. She has held residencies at Pioneer Works and the American Museum of Natural History. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, Harvard, The Simons Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, among others, and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artforum. Represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, she is a Professor of Art at Chapman University, where she teaches painting and interdisciplinary courses at the intersection of art and science.

Irene Georgia Tsatsos

Irene Georgia Tsatsos (she/her) is an artist with fluid life/work/art boundaries. For over 30 years, she has sustained a daily rhythm of writing, drawing, and reading, which informs her work in clay, textiles, installation, and curatorial projects. Her interests center on the interpersonal and psychosocial dynamics, norms, and values within families, relationships, workplaces, and communities. She explores family histories, migration stories, intergenerational trauma, loneliness, death rituals, cultural assimilation, attachment styles, the agency of infants and toddlers, and epigenetics. Until 2023, Irene served as Director of Exhibition Programs and Chief Curator at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA. She has also held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Getty, published extensively, and served on numerous award and program panels. After holding the honor of being founding chair of the early Feminist Center for Creative Work, she is back on the board for this next chapter.

Meara Daly

Meara Daly is the founder of DALY PR, a public relations, communications, and strategy consultancy for design, architecture, and landscape. She has three decades of experience in all areas of media relations, marketing, and strategic development with a focus on quality, targeted design stories. DALY PR is dedicated to supporting, engaging, and broadcasting the work of multi-disciplinary designers, artists, and creatives, particularly bolstering studios run by women. Most recently she led the communications strategy for the new Anthony Timberlands Center at the University of Arkansas, designed by the Pritzker Prize winning Irish studio Grafton Architects. Prior to founding Daly PR she was a partner at NelsonDaly and a marketing consultant for several award-winning LA-based design studios and was the marketing director for Leers Weinzapfel Associates in Boston. Her writing about design has appeared in the Architect’s Newspaper, the LA Review of Architecture, and other publications.

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Xtina Webb

Xtina Webb (she/they) is a Queer intersectional feminist and explorer based in Los Angeles and the Hi Desert. Their graphic and exhibition design work prioritizes cultural and non-profit institutions. This practice includes research projects that explore modes of participation and collaboration, site specificity, the examination of social constructs in public space, and their queering. This is also present in her teaching at Otis College of Art and Design.