Board of Directors – Berkeley Commonplace

Ingrid Ekström has 40 years professional experience in business operations, external and internal communications and marketing, primarily for Bay Area renewable energy, technology and architecture companies.

She’s led strategic development initiatives; guided executives and teams in the implementation of complex, multi-faceted programs; and managed large marketing budgets. As a stay-at-home mom for four years, she also ran her own communications consultancy. Ingrid has a bachelor’s degree from Colby College, and a Business Strategy certificate from the University of Virginia. She led Berkeley Commonplace’s efforts to incorporate and secure non-profit status and currently plans and runs board meetings, maintains financial records and insurance coverage, and helps plan and support fundraising and events.

Ingrid lives in Berkeley, California with her family. She’s participated in the Postal Collage Project every year since it started in 2011.

ingrid@berkeleycommonplace.org

Andrea Guskin is a San Francisco Bay Area based artist, art educator, and arts administrator who specializes in creating innovative participatory visual and performing art programs and events in museums, schools, and community centers.

She began her career in New York City at The Children’s Museum of Manhattan and continued with Bay Area museums such as The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, The Oakland Museum of California, and Habitot Children’s Museum in Berkeley. Additionally, Andrea was appointed to serve as an Alameda County Arts Commissioner for District 3 in 2019.

Using the everyday materials of mending, Andrea’s art practice explores the layers of social and emotional experience related to ancestry, immigration, and domestic life. In addition to her mixed media work, she often explores these themes within a participatory community context, such as in her 2019 From Where to Here Project, in which she invited community members to reflect on their own and their families’ journeys to the Bay Area through interactive collaborative paintings. In 2020, Andrea started three projects: Virtual Cultural Connections, Filling in Spaces, and Hold me in the Palm of your Hand. Virtual Cultural Connections connects zoom classrooms to live performances, Filling in Spaces transforms vacant spaces into opportunities for artists, and Hold me in the Palm of your Hand combines sewn canvases inspired by palm lines of global participants with sculptural paintings that reflect on routes of connection, places of refuge, and the distance that exists between us.

Originally raised amongst the woods and college campuses of Wisconsin and Ohio, she currently lives and works in San Leandro, CA with her husband and two sons.

andrea@berkeleycommonplace.org

Julie Lynn Marten is an artist and arts educator in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is an active member of the San Francisco music scene.

She worked as a free-lance photographer and visual artist in the music industry in the 2000’s, participated in solo and group photography exhibits in San Francisco, and collaborated on short films, music videos, and documentaries as Cinematographer, Archivist, Story Editor or Associate Producer. Her photographic work centered around photographic processes montaging imagery at both the camera and darkroom stages of creation to evoke meaning and experience through indirect associations.

Julie started teaching Fine Arts and Photography at Woodside High School 12 years ago, and since that time has focused her own creative work on writing, recording and performing music with various rock outfits in the Bay Area. She has been a participant in Round Table Collaboration off and on for ten years, as well as mentoring several of her students through the process.

julie@berkeleycommonplace.org

C.K.Itamura is a Yonsei, Nikkei interdisciplinary artist based in California. Her conceptual, interactive and performance art serves to engage intergenerational audiences in the exploration of observation, contemplation and expressive imagination.

C.K. is a recipient of the Discovered Award for Emerging Visual Artists of Sonoma County, the founder and publisher of Kanreki Press, the editor of Chottohon magazine, a co-founder of Book Arts Roadshow, and a former director of San Francisco Center for the Book.

C.K. is an Artist-in-Residence of San Francisco Unified School District Library Department and San Francisco Arts Education Project, and works with schools, libraries and museums to to create and provide: professional development art-making workshops for educators; hands-on art-making workshops for students; and to make art-making accessible to the general public.

cheryl@berkeleycommonplace.org

Jan Kather has been teaching media arts and humanities courses at Elmira College, Elmira, NY, since 1979. She has been the recipient of and participant in several NYSCA artist grant projects focusing on collaboration, including Aleatoric Video and Mobile Matinee.

Globally, collaborations include Berkeley Commonplace projects such as Fragments, Subject Matters, and the Round Table Collaboration Postal Collage Project. She organized and installed the international invitational video collaborations Water Preserves, In the Morning (To Let Art Program), and Ex Libris in galleries, storefronts and libraries in the Finger Lakes region of NY. Her most recent exhibition at the cooperative State of the Art Gallery Ithaca included Many Views of Mt. Fuji, an experiment in relational aesthetics with former Japanese students.

jan@berkeleycommonplace.org

Marty McCutcheon is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Berkeley, California. His paintings are found in personal collections across the USA, as well as in Europe and Asia.

His interactive installations have been exhibited at the Arnot Museum in Elmira, New York (in collaboration with Michael Chang and Jan Kather), at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco (in collaboration with B.S. Wise), and at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco.

As founder and project coordinator of Round Table Collaboration, in association with schools and institutions such as UC Berkeley School of Education, City College of San Francisco, The Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Berkeley Public Library and Berkeley Art Center, McCutcheon has involved many hundreds of participants in collaborative art projects and workshops. For his arts-oriented contributions to the community, June 12, 2018 was officially proclaimed ‘Marty McCutcheon Day’ in the City of Berkeley.

marty@berkeleycommonplace.org