Tiffany Owens

Tiffany Owens: Collaborating with Others to Change the Arts Education Landscape 

Throughout her life, the artist, educator, and Antioch alum Tiffany Owens has been deeply influenced by spaces on the borders that straddle divides. “I am a person who has always lived in liminal spaces—racially, socioeconomically, educationally, and between artistry and bureaucracy,” explains Owens, who today serves as Program Director of P.S. ARTS, a nonprofit that brings arts education to over 30,000 public school students in the greater Los Angeles area.

Douglas Valdez presenting in a classroom.

Cool Course: Latinx/e Theories & Clinical Practice

Douglas Valdez grew up familiar with curandería, the traditional healing practices that his mother had learned as a child in Mexico. When he was sick, she would pull out an array of herbal tinctures and dapple his tongue with their bitter, dark liquid. When his skin got irritated, his mother spread tangerine peels on it—their aroma delicious and lingering. 

A group of people smiling and posing for a photo in a well-lit room with a pleasant ambiance.

In Bhutan, Collaborating to Ethically Preserve an Indigenous Bioculture 

In 2017, Dawn Murray, a Professor in the Environmental Studies Department and Director of the BS in Environmental Studies, Sustainability, and Sciences, traveled to the Kingdom of Bhutan by invitation from the Monpa people to collaborate with them to document the knowledge of their last community healer, Ap Tawla. Ap Tawla, who was in his 80s, feared that his death would mark the extinction of much of the Monpa people’s collective wisdom, which like a braid reaching back in time, connects them with their ancestors. 

Emma Lombardi

For Emma Lombardi, Individualized Study Meant Listening to Her Ancestors

For Emma Lombardi, Individualized Study Meant Listening to Her Ancestors 

As she picked up the phone to call the main office of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, Emma Lombardi felt restless and nervous. This was the first time she called the tribal offices for reasons other than logistics. Even more nerve-wracking, this was her first attempt to connect with a part of her heritage and culture that she felt estranged from…

A man wearing glasses sits at a desk, focused on his computer screen.

Cool Course: 5003: Foundations in Individualized Study

If you ever talk to a student, alum, or faculty member of Antioch’s Individualized Master of Arts, there is a high likelihood that they will bring up “FDN-5003: Foundations in Individualized Study.” This course, with its alphanumeric code that sounds like something from a Sci-Fi story, is much more than just another class.

A bearded man smiling inside a bomb shelter.

The Nonprofit Innovator Who Moved to Wartime Ukraine (But Kept Teaching Online) 

It was a feeling more than a reason that compelled David Greco to pack his apartment into a storage unit and buy a one-way ticket to Kyiv, Ukraine, in May 2023. The memories of crouching beneath his elementary school desk during nuclear drills amid heightened tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union flashed back to him.