Ingrid Ekström has been a communications and marketing professional for over 30 years, with experience in the technology, renewable energy, and architecture, engineering and construction industries. She is a member of the International Association of Business Communicators, and has actively supported a number of professional organizations throughout her career, including serving as Public Relations Committee Chairperson of the Solar Energy Industry Association for five years.
Ingrid lives in Berkeley, California with her family. She’s participated in the Round Table Collaboration Postal Collage Project for eleven years.
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.
C.K.Itamura is a Yonsei, Nikkei interdisciplinary artist based in Sonoma County, California. Her conceptual, visual, performance and community engagement art serves to engage diverse multicultural, intergenerational audiences in the exploration of observation, contemplation and expressive imagination.
C.K. is a recipient of the 2019 Discovered Awards for Emerging Visual Artists made possible, in part, by Creative Sonoma and Community Foundation Sonoma County. She is: an Artist-in-Residence of The Imaginists, Chalk Hill Residency and In Cahoots Residency; a Co-Founder of Book Arts Roadshow; a board member of Berkeley Commonplace; a Guesthouse custodian artist of The Imaginists; an advisory committee member of Write Now! SF Bay; and a former director of San Francisco Center for the Book. She has served in directorial, managerial and/or production roles for live theatrical performances, live events, concerts and festivals, radio shows and video productions.
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.
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.