Seetha Raghupathy
Seetha Raghupathy received her Bachelors in Architecture from Anna University, India and a Masters in Urban Design from Harvard University. She has worked for multinational firms including Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP and RTKL Associates Inc., in the United States and also has research and work experience in India and South Africa. Her interests include affordable housing, planning and design for low-income settlements and the dynamics of transformation of Asian cities to Global cities. She is deeply committed to local/regional community design and a socially conscious practice. Raghupathy is currently a designer-in-residence at UCSB and is developing a planning road map and community network through a participatory planning process in order to address the multiple challenges facing the University adjacent community of Isla Vista.
Kim Yasuda
Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara and co-director of the system wide University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). For the past 5 years, Yasuda has activated university teaching with her public arts research, developing initiatives that forge partnerships between academic environs and the local/regional communities in which they are situated, exploring potential intersections between a creative practice and community development. Yasuda has collaborated with her students on off-site projects, including a public art plan for an affordable farm-worker housing complex in Oxnard, CA, the repurposing of shipping containers into mobile art studios and the recent public art project initiatives in the college community of Isla Vista, California.
Through these ‘open classroom’ field experiments, Yasuda established the Friday Academy, a temporary instructional environment within the university that maintains its own academic calendar and experimental curricula to conduct year-round, off-site and project-based learning within “an itinerant classroom setting”. Straying from studio arts training models, the Friday Academy encourages “flexible programming in response to immediate social and environmental concerns, drawing from students, academics and community scholars to work together in situated partnerships”. Yasuda identifies this alternative field practice as “civic aesthetics” – a response to what she believes is a critical need to retool existing institutional learning structures toward a model of “anticipatory education” — one that prepares the 21st century practitioner with the creative skill set and nimble capacity to navigate the dynamics of an uncertain future.”
Yasuda has commissioned public works throughout California and has exhibited her installation work internationally at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Camerawork, London; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Connecticut and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston. She is the recipient of two visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
John Peterson
Founding Director of Public Architecture , has served as external project advisor since 2006. The San Francisco-based non-profit advocates for the profession of architecture to work in the service of the public interest, acting as a catalyst for discourse through education, advocacy and the design of public spaces and amenities.
Institutional Support:
Henry Yang, Chancellor, UCSB
Gene Lucas, Executive Vice Chancellor, UCSB
Marc Fisher, Associate Vice Chancellor, Campus Design and Facilities, UCSB
Ron Betancourt, Lee Mudrick and Kimberly Tapia, Contracts Division, UCSB
Debbie Fleming, Yonie Harris and Don Lubach, Office of Student Life, UCSB
Charlene Chew-Ogi and Housing Services team, UCSB
Isla Vista Agencies:
Doreen Farr, Third District Supervisor, County of Santa Barbara
Esther Aguilera, Third District Supervisor’s Office
Brian Olmstead, Eric Raney and team, Isla Vista Foot Patrol (Sheriff’s Department)
Heather Allen and Jeff Lindgren, Isla Vista Redevelopment Agency
Stakeholders- community members:
Ellen Anderson
Alka Arora
Michael Bean
Catherine Boyer
Carolyn Buford
Clayton Carlson
Emily Cheney
Keith Clarke
Melissa Cohen
Becky Cohn
Diane Conn
Joe Dandero
Neil Dipaola
Robin Donaldson
John Doyle
Hiromi Dugan
Catherine Estrada
Samantha Fretwell
James Gelb
Craig Geyer
Mike Goodchild
Nancy Gottlieb
Chuck Haines
Kellie Hartl
Tylor Headrick
Susan Horne
Indy Hurt
Ian Kaminsky
Zaveeni Khan-Marcus
Chloe Kirk
Hilary Kleger
Rob Kooyman
Roger Lagerquist
Corilyn Lantz
Jennifer Lebell
Michael Lebell
Rachel Lindt
Monica Lopez
Viviana Marsano
Melanie Matson
Kate McCarthy
Patrick Melroy
Ryan A. Miller
Lu Ann Miller
Kris Miller-Fisher
Bruce Murdock
Brooke Neely
Harry Nelson
Mark Orfalea
Barbra Ortiz
Lindsey Quock
D.J. Palladino
Bob Potter
Elizabeth Robinson
Martin Raubal
Harry Reese
Sandra Reese
Tye Simpson
Stephanie Smith
Janet Stich
Barbara Torre
Nancy Vasquez
Lou Ventura
Ken Warfield
Dennis Whelan
Fried Wittman
Scott Wolfe
Beth Wynstra
Walter Yuen