The Artist Mentorship Hub is a 3-day program for 1st/2nd generation emerging immigrant and refugee artists in the Bay Area. The program centers 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. Participants will reflect on their own journeys as artists thus far, identifying their goals and needs, and grounding their values and wishes. Each day will include creative exercises, group workshops, and individual coaching sessions. Please see below for a list of this year’s facilitators and program offerings.

Applicants must be a Bay Area based artist who is a refugee, immigrant, or child of refugees/immigrants to apply. We strongly encourage and welcome applications from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ 1st/2nd generation artists. 

The 2023 cohort will consist of 6 artists. Each artist will receive a $250 stipend for their participation.  The program will be held in-person at the ARTogether Center located at 1200 Harrison St., Oakland. 

2023 Workshops

Mapping Arts Praxis: Exploring Our Values and Time through Mapmaking

Facilitator: Sabina Shanti Kariat 

Participants will view their lives as maps, engaging in mapmaking, illustration, and collage to identify their aspirations and make space for those goals in their lives. Artists will define the values that matter to them, portion out time and space in their maps to dedicate to those values, and engage in discussion about ways to actualize the proportional mapping of their values into their lives and arts practices. We will conclude the activity by spreading a map onto a larger scale and finding solidarities between the goals of different artists, locating overlaps in our intentions and making space for collaboration and community support.

Writing from Abundance
Facilitator: Kimberley Acebo Arteche
This transformative grant-writing workshop is designed to empower you with the skills, mindset, and rituals necessary to unlock the abundance of funding opportunities. Whether you’re a seasoned grant writer or just starting your journey, this workshop will provide rituals, tools, and knowledge to confidently navigate the grant writing process. This workshop acknowledges that money can hold deep emotional and psychological significance, often tied to past traumas and limiting beliefs, especially for artists of color. We will explore money rituals and practices that support the release of scarcity mindsets, and abundance cultivation practices. We will delve into the technical aspects of grant writing, equipping you with the essential techniques to craft compelling proposals that effectively communicate your vision, goals, and impact. Learn how to structure your proposals, write persuasive narratives, and highlight the significance of your project in a concise and impactful manner.

Value-Centered Artist Statement & Other Tools of the Trade 

Facilitator: Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen

In this workshop, artists will ground themselves in their values while drafting an artist statement that blends those values with their unique experiences. The session will end with a review of several tools artists need to organize and promote their work and will learn strategies around how to incorporate your statement and values into these tools.

Project Management as an Artist in Community

Facilitator: Raeshma Razvi

Managing art projects (especially those in community) require more than ‘getting organized’ or finishing a work of art.  In this workshop, Raeshma breaks down some of the important things to consider in the beginning, middle and end phases of a project .  Using three different creative projects she’s directed/produced as illustrations, she’ll discuss ten things that are important to understand and cultivate through the lifespan of a complex project (one involving multiple stakeholders, participants, and artistic and social outcomes).  Whether you work in a community or not, these areas can still help artists ready themselves for and navigate creative challenges. 

2023 Facilitators

Kimberley Acebo Arteche (she/they) is an educator, cultural worker, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work explores the hybrid cultures formed by technology, movements of immigrants in America, and the way movements through space and spaces have been affected by these two. Arteche received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and MFA from San Francisco State University where she received the School of Art’s Distinguished Graduate award. She has been awarded the Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Art Award by the San Francisco Foundation, was Kearny Street Workshop’s Featured Visual Artist in the 2015 APAture Festival, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Growlery. She has shown at East Tennessee State University, SOMArts Cultural Center and at the Wailoa Arts & Cultural Center in Hilo, Hawaii. Arteche is committed to collaboratively creating decolonial practices within arts institutions, while creating visibility and providing resources for emerging Asian Pacific American and BIPOC Artists. Photo Credit: Lara Kaur

Sabina Shanti Kariat (she/her/they) is a San Francisco-based animator, filmmaker, and educator whose artistic practice uses illustration, animation, co-creation, and anti-racist arts pedagogy as a way to platform stories of marginalized communities, combat the erasure of our community histories with visualization, to ideate radical futures through art, and ultimately to incite action to manifest those visions of equitable futures. She has created animations for films about the 1960’s civil rights movement, the history of Asian American incarceration camps in California, the impact of the criminal justice system on refugees, and loss of native languages among immigrants. Sabina has worked as a teaching artist throughout San Francisco, held co-creation workshops with Adivasi (indigenous) activists in rural Jharkhand India as a Brown University Social Innovation Fellow, and with Syrian-Turkish youth in Istanbul, Turkey as a Fulbright fellow. She is interested in illustration as a way to combat erasure, education as a way to explore unlearning, and diaspora as its own form of world-building, time-bending, memory-preservation, and futurism. Her films and animations have been screened at Southern Exposure Juried Exhibition , “Don’t Google It” Short Film Showcase, “Karagoz, Hacivat, and Me” Karam House Art Show, New York Istanbul Short Film Festival, LA Documentary Film Festival, Universal Kids Film Festival, Home is Distant Shores Festival, International Migration and Environment Film Festival, “File/Life” interactive video installation at Temple University Institute on Disability, and Berkeley Arts Center’s juried show curated by Hoi Leung. 

Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen (she/they) is a curator, consultant, and project-based artist from San Francisco. With a long background in the performing and visual arts, Rhiannon is deeply influenced by her own — and her communities’ — intersectional  identities. She is driven by her pursuit of “productive discomfort”: her curatorial focus on projects that push boundaries of scale, scope, medium, venue, and dialogue; and her cross-discipline personal work engages symbols, identity, ritual, communication, and the unseen.

In 2013 she founded A Simple Collective: an organization dedicated to fostering creative independence for professionals, and professional independence for creatives, and Black & White Projects: an experimental project space in San Francisco’s Mission District. Deeply involved with community-building through the arts, she is on the Curatorial Committees for Root Division and Sites Unseen, is a founding member of Pacific Felt Factory and Invisibility Collective, and is Co-Director of Emerging Arts Professionals.

Raeshma Razvi (she/her) is an Indian/Muslim/American filmmaker, writer and producer of transformative community arts projects. She is the founder of the “Shahrazad Squad,” a collective of women/nonbinary creatives and cultural producers from the MENASA diaspora engaged in story-sharing, community-building and creative advocacy. She has partnered with Cal Shakes, Cal Humanities, the International Museum of Women, Islamic Cultural Center of Northern CA, SOMArts, Seeds of Peace, Global Action Project and others on collaborative, multicultural, original arts programming. She was awarded a 2009 Schwartz Prize for outstanding work in the public humanities in CA; in NYC she collaborated with refugee teens on award-winning documentary work made possible by an Open Society Institute Fellowship. Recent film productions include “Sailor, Sufi, Spy,” a documentary about a Sufi boat-builder in Sausalito, and a video series of shorts based on the poetry of Hafiz.  Raeshma holds a BA in comparative literature and an MFA in Film. She currently lives in Connecticut and northern California.