Creative Strategist/Artist in Residence, 2019-2020
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, Norwalk, CA

In 2019-2020, I was the Creative Strategist/Artist-in-Residence for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (RRCC), working on voter education and outreach across LA County, the largest and most diverse electoral district in the United States. My position was a partnership between RRCC and Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, under LA County’s Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative (CEII). The CS/AIR program embeds artists in County Departments to develop, strategize, promote, and implement artist-driven solutions to civic issues. I was embedded with RRCC outreach, develop artistic interventions and engagement programs to engage historically underrepresented communities of voters.

For my main project, Next Generation of Voters, I partnered with art, design and communications students and faculty at 10 LA County public colleges and universities that had been selected to host on-campus voting for the 2020 California Primary. Students designed and participated in digital, print, wearable and event-based campaigns to get out the campus vote, using the power of peer-to-peer messaging to energize students, faculty and staff.

The most exciting thing for me about this project was the diversity of projects produced in the student-driven workshops. Every school defined their own project based on their skills, interests and availability, and opportunities to integrate civic engagement with their curricular program. At some schools, I worked with a professor and their class for many weeks to produce printed materials that were adopted by administration and featured in campus-wide voter education. Other professors adapted a course’s student learning objectives to focus on voting. I worked with any school that expressed interest, even in cases where academic schedules only allowed for a single energetic workshop session. I am proud of all the students and faculty who took a chance on this experimental project and lent their time and talents to Next Generation of Voters.

Thank you to the many people who helped make these projects possible, and who helped me navigate County government and higher education, with special thanks to:

Pauline Kamiyama
Robin Garcia
Kimberly Glann
Kristin Sakoda
Anu Yudav
Olga Koumoundouros
Sandra de la Loza
Clement Hamani
Alan Nakagawa
Michael Sanchez
Philip Verbera
Lu Lu
Laura Herrera
Andre Khatami
Samantha Fields
Devon Tsuno
David Gamboa
Amy Bentley-Smith
Maia Assaf
Rebecca Sittler Schrock
Carolyn Castano
Phung Huynh
Ian Evenstar
Lynne Berman
Zachary Vernon
Jenny Mikesell
Vanessa Madrid
Walter Meyer
Christopher Badger
Kimberly Rosenfeld
Christine Freirichs