ARTogether’s Artist Mentorship Hub & Residency
ARTogether’s Artist Mentorship Hub is a multidisciplinary art program for emerging refugee, immigrant, diasporic, and underrepresented artists in the Bay Area.
The program centers wellness, collective power building, and peer connection while providing mentorship, guidance, and professional development led by local artists and art professionals established in the field. Participants receive a free, shared art studio at the ARTogether Center to activate for their individual and collective art projects.
2026 Artists in Residence
Aye Myat Thu (Aylin) is a multidisciplinary illustrator and community-centered artist from Myanmar, now based in the Bay Area. Her work explores healing, belonging, and everyday life through illustration, comics, and participatory art. She creates visual storytelling projects, creative learning tools, and workshops that invite reflection and emotional connection. During the Myanmar crisis, she launched free online drawing classes and later developed a beginner course that reached over 1,600 students. Her practice sits at the intersection of art, education, and wellbeing, aiming to create gentle spaces where creativity becomes a tool for connection and resilience.
Bronchè Taylor is a Bay Area-based multidisciplinary artist, director, and cultural curator working at the intersection of performance, storytelling, and community. A graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, his work spans stage, film, and live music, blending raw narrative with refined, immersive design. Rooted in Oakland, Bronchè centers Black expression, legacy, and transformation through art. He is the founder of Black Air, a creative platform uplifting global artists, and the creator of Live Frequency, a performance experience merging sound, story, and audience. His practice is grounded in creating intentional spaces where art feels lived, intimate, and undeniably alive.
Donny Phan’s craft is a love letter to his nonhumans: past and present. The dried plant is central to his practice as it holds memory, transformation, and temporality. He is influenced by the concepts of otherness and universal impermanence. He was a comic-loving kid who dreamt of becoming a mutant with superpowers. The X-Men narrative was an allegory to his own experience of being different and marginalized. To stay out of trouble, his parents gave him tools to create his own superheroes. Imagination is a superpower. plant-tecture is his experimental playground to arrange, edit, add, subtract, cut, paste, and illustrate an otherworldly utopia of metamorphosed flora and fauna. Freed from anthropocentrism, they reclaim agency over their environments. His work explores a reversal of power (not as revenge but as rebalancing) and process is through play, unexpected materials, juxtapositions, and subtle absurdity.
Jacquie Verbal is a cultural archival artist whose work rests at the intersection of cultural critique and Black liberation. Jacquie is the founder and publisher of Blackstack, a grassroots nonprofit for Black writers with a mission to preserve Black stories through archival print publishing. Her practice engages print as both medium and process; she curates enduring records of Black life that resist erasure.
Ji Young Lee is an interdisciplinary artist and storyteller based in San Francisco, California. Working in abstract painting, prints and illustrations.
Sabri Tunca (b. 1986, Istanbul) is a felt artist based in San Francisco. He discovered felting by chance in 2008 and developed his practice through self-directed experimentation. Working under the name “Feltthink,” he creates one-of-a-kind sculptural, wearable, and functional textile works. His work transforms wool into expressive, tactile forms, combining color and texture in playful and experimental ways.
Saskia (he/they) is a descendent of Muslim javanese ancestors who paved their way to wear Batik, Mad Crazy ancestors who paved their way to reject psychiatric institutions and all cages, and Queer/Trans ancestors who paved their way into radical imaginings of the world. Their ancestors live in him as they migrate and migrate, across continents and, as of recent, neighborhoods in Berkeley. Experiencing multiple involuntary hospitalizations, interrogating asylum and kinship as a Mad Neurodivergent abolitionist becomes central to their investigation. He historically engages with Acrylic paint and block printing and is expanding to multidisciplinary realms.
Tea Sherman is a 3rd generation Black San Franciscan and fine artist. Raised primarily in East Oakland, she seeks to explore themes of familial relation, portal creation, and weaving through her artworks in an attempt to inspire exploration and relation for herself and others. Sherman currently works as a community organiser, curating events for transgender individuals across the Bay Area.
2026 Mentors
Kimberley Acebo Arteche is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and healer working across photography, textiles, and ritual. Arteche is the co-founder of Balay Kreative, a cultural hub and artist incubator program serving Filipina/o/x artists in SOMA Pilipinas, and has served on Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council, SOMA Pilipinas’ Arts & Culture Committee, the Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Arts Panel, and is currently the Executive Director at Brava! For Women in the Arts.
Trina Michelle Robinson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationship between memory and migration. She studies the fragments of memory and repurposes them, examining every fracture, fold and glitch to release trauma while simultaneously uplifting the forgotten moments that should be celebrated. Her work has been shown at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, ICA San José, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, New York’s Wassaic Project, and the triennial Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora, was part of their Emerging Artist Program 2022-23.
Weston Teruya is a visual artist who moves between individual and collective modes of practice. His work has been exhibited at Mills College Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa; and supported by Artadia, Asian Cultural Council, and Headlands Center for the Arts. His collaborative work primarily manifests through Related Tactics, a collective of artists of color who create projects at the intersection of race and culture. Their work has been supported by Rainin Foundation, Craft Research Fund, Ruth Arts, Kala Art Institute’s Print Public, and Montalvo Arts Center.
Christine Wong Yap is a visual artist and social practitioner who specializes in hyperlocal, participatory research projects which gather and amplify grassroots perspectives on belonging, resilience, and mental well being. Her projects combine drawing, lettering, printmaking, publishing, and textiles with community engagement, inclusive design, and public art and activations. She has developed public-facing, human-centered projects with the California College of the Arts, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, For Freedoms, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Stanford University, Times Square Arts, and the Wellcome Trust. She is a recipient of the Creative Power Award from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund and a Creative Capital Award. She holds a BFA and MFA in printmaking from the California College of the Arts.
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Our Story
In 2022, with the support of Oakland’s Cultural Funding Program, ARTogether and Oakland Art Murmur partnered to pilot an artist mentorship program for Oakland-based refugee and immigrant artists. The program welcomes artists of all crafts, levels, and experiences looking to expand their network, learn new skills, develop their career, and obtain professional guidance.
Throughout the program, participants were paired with a mentor artist with compatible interests, artistic craft specialties, experience levels, and/or goals for the mentorship program.
ARTogether was thrilled to deepen this project of intentional community building and culturally relevant professional development in 2023, through a 3-day intensive program centering gathering, collective power building, and peer connection while providing mentorship, guidance, and professional development led by local, BIPOC artists and art professionals established in the field. 1st and 2nd generation immigrant, refugee, and diasporic artists reflected on their own journeys as artists thus far, identified their goals and needs, and grounded themselves within their values and wishes. Each day included creative exercises, group workshops, and individual coaching sessions.
In 2024, ARTogether piloted a version of the Hub that included a year-long studio residency. The newly expanded Mentorship Hub & Residency program officially launched in 2025, with artists participating in workshops, open studios, exhibitions, and community engagement opportunities at ARTogether year-round.
Previous instructors in this program included Raeshma Razvi, Kimberley Acebo Arteche, Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen, Jason Bayani, Maw Shein Win, Preeti Vangani, Edward Gunawan, Rupy Tut, Sabina Kariat, Nivedita Rajendra, Christine No, Shelley Wong, and Chetna Mehta.
This program is supported by the East Bay Community Foundation, California Arts Council, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and San Francisco Foundation.
Alumni
2025
Kate Goka
Roger Kim
Mame Marieme LO
Fateme Mokhles
Mona Wang
Jackie Romero
Martin Rodriguez Serrano
2024 (Pilot Residency)
Alisson Gothz
Sen Mendez
Linah Sofi
Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola
Valerie Win Liu
Ipeleng Kgositsile
Romina Zabihian
Arina Sawari-Stadnyk
2023 (Literary Arts Focus)
Zara Jamshed
Kristie Song
Diana Fu
saahil m.
Angel Bista
Elizabeth Feng
Diana Medina
Percy Shumacher
Amy Zhou 周纯
Tracy Jones
Kiki Quach
Clary Ahn
Carmela Gaspar
Vina Vo
Jerrica Li
Jessica Yuru Zhou 周玉茹
Marwa Doost
2023
Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola (Photography, Writing)
Valerie Win Liu (Illustration)
Ipeleng Kgositsile (Performance, Writing)
Dalar Alahverdi (Visual Art)
Romina Zabihian (Visual Art)
Arina Sawari-Stadnyk (Visual Art, Writing)
2022
Sunroop Kaur (Visual Art)
Sen Mendez (Visual Art)
Etty Alberto (Visual Art)
Linah Sofi (Visual Art)
Anita Sulimanovic (Visual Art)
René Revolorio Keith (Visual Art)
Jawn Wilson (Visual Artist)
Alisson Gothz (Multidisciplinary)
Juliana Mendonca (Dance)
Ariam Weldeab Araya (Film)