What’s My Thesis?

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with South African interdisciplinary artist Azole Njengele, an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, about the relationship between architecture, drawing, and photography in her evolving practice. Reflecting on her education and professional experience in South Africa before relocating to the United States, Azole discusses how architectural trainin...

Interdisciplinary artist Manny Valdez joins What's My Thesis? to discuss his participatory practice, recent projects, and experiences as an MFA graduate from Otis College of Art and Design. Drawing on performance, installation, screen printing, and artist participation, Valdez examines how artists construct identity, navigate institutional structures, and create opportunities within the contempora...

Javier Proenza speaks with Ioanna Sakellaraki, a Greek visual artist, photographer, and Fulbright Scholar currently conducting research with the Smithsonian, about the development of her interdisciplinary practice across photography, collage, embroidery, and archival work. The conversation examines Sakellaraki’s transition from a career in communications strategy with EU institutions into contempo...

For the 300th episode of What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza is joined by Los Angeles-based artists and cultural workers Dakota Noot and Christopher Anthony Velasco for an informal conversation shaped by friendship, shared history, and long experience in contemporary art communities. The discussion reflects on public visibility, social media hostility, reputation, and the shifting dynamics of creati...

In this episode, Dave Young Kim, a Los Angeles–based muralist and curator, discusses his recent exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. Developed around the theme of Asian mythical creatures, the project reframes historical material through the structure of the immigrant experience, pairing objects from the museum’s collection with contemporary artworks and newly commissioned pieces...

Snezana Petrovic, a Yugoslav-born painter, installation artist, and former production designer, joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss her early career across film and theater in Yugoslavia and her forced migration to California during the country’s collapse in the early 1990s. She reflects on the loss of a national identity, the experience of displacement, and the complexities of being categorized wi...

Joe Galarza is a Los Angeles-based muralist, musician, and community educator whose practice engages Indigenous identity, political resistance, and the social role of art. Introduced through the East L.A. punk scene, Galarza traces his early influences from heavy metal illustration to anarchist thought, and later to Indigenous-led movements shaped by land struggles, NAFTA-era organizing, and Zapat...

In this episode, photographer Josh Schaedel discusses his work founding and sustaining an artist-run exhibition space in Los Angeles, reflecting on a practice rooted in service, hospitality, and access for emerging artists. He addresses the material and economic realities of photography, including the costs of production and framing, and the structural challenges that limit broader institutional s...

Artist Donel Williams reflects on his unconventional path into art, from community college photography to his studies at UCLA, where he developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, performance, and installation. Drawing on personal history and mentorship, he describes how early experiences shaped his engagement with labor, material, and image-making. The conversation centers on the ex...

Faris McReynolds is a painter and musician whose practice engages directly with the structures of the contemporary art world. In this conversation, he reflects on his early entry into the gallery system, the financial realities of sustaining a painting practice, and the conditions that led him to step away from commercial representation. The discussion addresses how wealth, collectors, and market...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles painter Jahn Baby Muller, a graduate of the USC Roski School of Art, joins host Javier Proenza to discuss his thesis work and the philosophical questions shaping his practice. Muller describes a body of still life paintings built from objects collected at estate sales—particularly toys and artifacts left behind by the Baby Boomer generation—which h...

Painter Katie Hector joins host Javier Proenza for a conversation on portrait painting, image culture, and the shifting cultural frameworks that shape how faces and bodies are represented in art. Hector reflects on her studio practice, discussing her return to figurative painting and the role of photographic source material in constructing contemporary portraits. The conversation also explores Hec...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, painter Estefania Ajcip joins host Javier Proenza to discuss the personal and cultural experiences that shape her work. Ajcip reflects on growing up between the United States and Guatemala, her Indigenous family background, and the circumstances that led her to return to the U.S. as a young adult. The conversation explores how family separation caused by immig...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Los Angeles–based Chicano artist Raul Baltazar about the cultural and historical foundations of his practice. Baltazar reflects on the origins of his performance character “Seven the Aztec Bunny,” first developed through ceremonies at Self Help Graphics’ Aztec New Year celebration, and discusses how Indigenous traditions, Cathol...

Kristine Shomaker is a Los Angeles–based conceptual painter and arts organizer, and the founder of Shoebox Arts and Art and Cake at the Brewery Art Complex. In this conversation, she reflects on building artist support systems outside traditional commercial models, restructuring a nonprofit to sustain mentorship, and expanding art journalism focused on marginalized communities. Shomaker also discu...

In this episode, Haitian painter and muralist Olivier Arsène Ganthier, an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, reflects on his artistic formation in Haiti and his current practice in Los Angeles. Raised in his father’s studio and trained at the National School of Arts in Haiti, Ganthier discusses the technical foundations of his education, the development of Haiti’s graffiti and mural...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, ceramic sculptor and installation artist Liz Stringer joins the podcast for an in-depth conversation about sculpture, scale, and the body. Working primarily with ceramics, metal armatures, and welded structures, Stringer discusses how her practice emerged from a background shaped by medicine, illness, and early encounters with Roman, Gothic, and Baroque archit...

In this episode, Javier Proenza speaks with Frannie Hemmelgarn, director and co-founder of DMST Atelier, an artist-run space in Los Angeles developed in collaboration with affordable housing providers. Hemmelgarn reflects on the space’s origins during the pandemic, its community feeds and public programming, and the responsibilities of artist-run initiatives within gentrifying neighborhoods. The c...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza speaks with Stephanie Sherwood, an artist and Exhibition Coordinator at the Brand Library in Glendale. Sherwood reflects on her dual role as a practicing artist and arts administrator, drawing on her experience working within municipal institutions such as libraries, city galleries, and public exhibition spaces. The conversation explores Sh...

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza speaks with Ever Velasquez, Director of Charlie James Gallery, about her path from collage and community organizing to gallery leadership, and the values guiding the gallery’s long-term commitment to artists in Los Angeles. Velasquez discusses curatorial pacing, group exhibitions as frameworks for career development, and the labor behind gallery...

Artist Joaquin Stacey joins Javier Proenza for a conversation on art, identity, and cultural formation shaped by migration. Born in Ecuador and raised in Miami before relocating to Los Angeles for his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design, Stacey reflects on how geography, language, and institutional training inform his practice. The discussion moves through painting, performance, and installation...

Artist Flora Kao joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss the evolution of her practice from painting to large-scale installation, and how Taiwanese mourning rituals, Buddhist symbolism, and diasporic memory shape her approach to space. Trained at Otis and later UC Irvine, Kao describes discovering installation as a way to create experiences that “elicit a sense of wonder,” pairing conceptual clarity wi...

Artist Manuel Vdah Bracamonte joins What’s My Thesis? for a grounded conversation on graffiti, identity, and the lived conditions that shaped Los Angeles street culture in the 1980s and 90s. Born in El Salvador and raised in downtown LA, Bracamonte traces his earliest memories of tagging, the shift into “tag banging,” and how the social and political pressures of that era intersected with his deve...

Artist Kelly Witmer joins host Javier Proenza to talk about material process, experimentation, and what it means to sustain an art practice in the desert. Based between Joshua Tree and Los Angeles, Witmer works across glass, ceramics, and painting, transforming the unpredictability of the kiln into a meditation on control, failure, and transformation. In this episode, she traces her trajectory fro...

René Camarillo is a Mexican-American craftsperson from East Los Angeles whose practice resists the hierarchies of the art world. Trained in apparel design at LA Trade Tech, fiber and material studies at Cal State LA, and textiles at RISD, Camarillo positions weaving and garment-making as acts of cultural inheritance, labor, and community survival rather than commodities of privilege. In this conve...