Faculty Members of Creative Inquiry Interdisciplinary Arts

Program Director

Cindy Shearer

Faculty Profiles

In real and invented life, Randall Babtkis, MFA (Columbia University), blends the immediacy of poetry with prose, art with artifact, colloquy with collage.

He is the founder of an early free media, cross-city/cross-genre work, The Telephone Project, produced in Venice, CA. He served as editor of Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose and has organized colloquia combining film, digital media, spoken word poetry and performance at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

Randall also taught writing workshops for the Academy of American Poets, curated a reading series at the Donnell Library, and read for the Academy’s Walt Whitman Award in New York.

More recently, he codirected the graduate writing program at New College of California. Randall has published a chapbook, Banister, and has contributed to literary magazines. His work has appeared in national publications ranging from The Quarterly to Slash Magazine, and can be found in The Columbia Review and Five Fingers Review.

Anne Bluethenthal, MFA, is founder and Artistic Director of ABD Productions, a multiethnic and multicultural modern dance company, committed to activism in the arts.

A woman-centered, collaborative dance ensemble, ABD is dedicated to creating a language of movement that breaks the ordinary paradigm of Western dance and to presenting choreographies that face difficult issues with eloquence and passion.

Through her choreography and community collaborations, Bluethenthal has presented work on subjects such as Palestine-Israel, globalization, the environment, genocide, and the gift economy.

ABD received the SF Chronicle’s Best of 2001, SF Weekly’s Black Box, the SF Bay Guardian’s Goldie Award for Achievement in Dance, and the Rhinette Award for Best Choreography.

Bluethenthal founded and produced the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival as well as the Dancing the Mystery series, a festival of dance, music, and poetry celebrating women’s spiritual traditions.

Certified by the American and London Societies for Teachers of the Alexander Technique, Bluethenthal maintains a private teaching practice. From 2005–2008, she served as co-director of the MFA Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts Program at New College of California.

Kris Brandenburger, PhD, earned a doctorate in Humanities from CIIS. Her dissertation, "The Reddest Rose Unfolds: a girl’s own fish stories," is a multiple genre creative writing piece. Her work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Violet Ink, the L.A. Review and several anthologies.

Kris has performed text-sound work at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music; The University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Ohlone College, Fremont; The Michigan Women’s Music Festival and several local clubs.

She founded The Feminist Bookie, An Author’s Agency—the first West Coast literary agency dedicated to feminist writers. She was also the founder of Select Electrics, a workshop for the repair of electrical systems on vintage race cars and museum quality restorations.

As owner/technician of Select Electrics she was asked to present in “Women’s Car Links” at the Oakland Museum of California. Her interests are eclectic and centered in the intersections of the literary, visual and intellectual arts. She sees teaching as the ideal learning vehicle.

The fiction and nonfiction of Carolyn Cooke, MFA (Columbia University), confront class, economics, gender, sexuality, and race in America; and her thinking about literature and pedagogy has been influenced by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, poststructuralist discourse, and relationships between spiritual life, material conditions, and social consciousness.

Carolyn's short story collection, The Bostons (Houghton Mifflin), won the PEN/Bingham award, was a finalist for the PEN/ LL Winship Award and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway.

Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The
O. Henry Awards, Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other national journals and magazines.

Carolyn's nonfiction reviews have appeared in The Nation and Contemporary Literary Criticism. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Djerassi Foundation, Ucross, and the Corporation of Yaddo.

From 2006 to 2008, Carolyn served as co-director of the MFA Writing Program at New College of California.

Judy Grahn, winner of the 2009 Lambda Award in Lesbian Poetry for love belongs to those who do the feeling, is a lifetime artist, teacher, and activist, whose work has been foundational to more than one social movement in the U.S. and internationally, including LGBTQ and Women’s Spirituality.

As a poet and social theorist, her work has been widely published, distributed, anthologized, and translated. She has presented her ideas in India, England, and Chile.

Both her book length poems have been staged; many other poems have been choreographed and put to music in all genres from folk-rock to new music classical and rap.

Judy performs and collaborates with musicians, dancers, and visual artists. Her latest chapbook is Mental, a nine-part poem studying the subject of crazy. Much of
Judy’s work centers on the reclamation of stories, values, and methods of Sacred Feminine traditions and archetypal characters.

She teaches all genres of writing, aesthetics, cultural theory, and literature. Also, Judy edits and publishes Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture.

Cindy Shearer, DA (State University of New York at Albany), is the director of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry. She has began teaching at CIIS in 1994, serving since 1998 as the director of the PhD in Humanities (Individualized Pathway) and as a faculty member in the Schools of Undergraduate Studies, and Consciousness and Transformation.

Cindy has also taught at Rollins College (Winter Park, FL), University of Minnesota at Mankato, University of Southern Maine, and Antioch University, among other academic institutions.

She practices and teaches writing as art, which she described in a 2003 exhibit as allowing her to “reconfigure the boundaries of writing and visual art,” join “tangible materials with the writing process,” and construct “visual work as I would a written text.”

In 2001, she created Ten Not-So-Tangible Tools for Writers, a meditation on the writing process in text and image. Cindy has also worked extensively as a workshop leader,
freelance editor, consultant, and writing coach. She is rediscovering a love of short story writing and developing one for personal and familiar essays.

Sarah Stone, MFA (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), has taught writing at University of California, Berkeley; New College of California; San Francisco State University; and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

She has also written for/taught on Korean public television, reported on human rights, and worked with orphan chimpanzees in Bujumbura, Burundi. Her novel, The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday 2002/Anchor 2003), was a BookSense 76 selection
and has been translated into German and Dutch, adopted for classroom and book club use, and discussed in Geoff Wisner’s A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa.

Sarah also wrote, with Ron Nyren, Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (Longman 2005), published in a trade version as The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing (Sourcebooks 2007).

Other publications include short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and reviews, including work in the McSweeney’s volume The Future Dictionary of America, the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and Ploughshares.

Her interests include the art and craft of imaginative writing, particularly iconoclastic, fantastic, political, and/or one-of-a-kind work; literatures that expand the boundaries of what we know about race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; and the ways in which literature and the arts can explore and embody consciousness.

Recent Adjunct Faculty, Program Mentors, Visiting and Community Artists

LIZ AMENI-HOLMES, illustrator, visual artist http://www.lunavilla.com/lunavilla/editorial.html
CLAUDIA BERNARDI, visual artist, human rights and social justice activist, community artist
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Gallery/bernardi/angelina.htm
MELANIE DEMORE, singer-songwriter, composer http://www.melaniedemore.com/home.html
PACO GOMEZ, dancer, choreographer, musician. http://www.pacogomesdance.com/
TRICIA GRAME, painter, sculptor, curator http://www.ncwca.org/grame.php
MARY GUZMAN, filmmaker http://oneof9films.com/
STEPHANIE ANNE JOHNSON, visual artist, light designer www.lightessencedesign.com
RHODESSA JONES actress, singer, writer, and Founder and Director of The Medea Project,
Theatre for Incarcerated Women http://www.culturalodyssey.org/v2/aboutus/rhodessa_bio.html
BETTY NOBUE KANO, painter, curator and lecturer. http://www.culturalodyssey.org/v2/aboutus/
rhodessa_bio.html; http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/961/303
KRISSY KEEFER, choreographer, performer, activist http://www.dancemission.com/dance_brigade.html
REV. SHILOH SOPHIA MCCLOUD, visual artist, writer http://www.colorofwoman.com/about.html
GAY OUTLAW, visual artist http://www.gayoutlaw.com/
SHARON PAGE RICHIE, textile artist, dancer
SILVIA PARRA (MAMA COATL), singer, songwriter http://www.myspace.com/mamacoatl
CANYON SAM, writer/activist, performance artist http://www.canyonsam.com/
ORLONDA UFFRE, visual artist http://www.orlondauffre.com/
Thomas Simpson, writer, performer, director, http://afrosolo.org
DEBRA WALKER, artist-painter, arts activist http://www.debrawalker.com/
ERICK WALKER, composer, musician http://www.wackoworldmusic.com/
MICHAEL WONG, visual artist