Otis College’s Fine Arts Program Announces Fall 2025 Visiting Artist Lecturers
The lecture series is an extension of the Fine Arts programs’ efforts to prepare students for careers in the arts.
At the heart of the Fine Arts program at Otis College of Art and Design—which confers both BFA and MFA degrees—is a renowned faculty of working professionals helping students build skills and push boundaries. Throughout the mentor-based curriculum, students work in group studios and one-on-one—artist-to-artist—to get the well-rounded and multidisciplinary experience necessary for a career in the art world.
Further preparation is conferred through the Visiting Artist Lecture Series, which brings distinguished artists, curators, and thinkers into close dialogue with students and the public. Recent speakers have included Audrey Chan, Miles Coolidge, Beatriz Cortez, Nicole Eisenman, Anne Ellegood, Darby English, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Karen Finley, Charles Gaines, Malik Gaines, Katie Grinnan, Ann Hamilton, Salomón Huerta, and more.
By bringing students into close proximity with working artists and designers, the lecture series is an extension of the Fine Arts programs' efforts to prepare students for careers in the arts as exhibiting artists, photographers, gallerists, curators, designers, or educators, among others.
The lineup for the Fall 2025 Visiting Artist Lecture Series was recently added to Otis's public events calendar and includes a mix of local and visiting artists working in a variety of mediums. All lectures include a Q&A, are held in the Forum auditorium on Otis's campus in Westchester, and are free and open to the public.
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Zebulon Zang is an artist, filmmaker, and curator. His research explores the role of mechanical reproduction in historiography, scientific discovery, and the augmentation of human vision.
His artistic work has been exhibited and screened internationally at venues such as the Vancouver International Film Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Casa Taller José Clemente Orozco in Guadalajara, Mexico; and the Kamias Biennale in Manila, Philippines.
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Kang Seung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in South Korea and now lives and works in Los Angeles. His work examines identity, community, and collective memory, and addresses the legacy of transnational queer histories as they intersect with art history.
Lee's work has been included in international exhibitions such as the 60th Venice Biennale; Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum; New Museum Triennial; and Gwangju Biennale. It's also in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, New York; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea; and MASP in São Paulo, Brazil, among others.
Thursday, September 23, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
John Knuth was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and lives and works in L.A. His mission is to take something traditionally regarded as base and to make it into something magnificent, where the materials feel secondary to the radical result. Like an art world diviner, he calls upon the elements, from making burn paintings with distress flares and metallic space blankets, to using fly regurgitation to make the most incandescent, shimmering paintings.
His work has been shown at LACMA; the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, among others. It is in the collections of The Getty in Los Angeles; Perez Art Museum in Miami, Florida; and the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. He has recently been featured in The Guardian, CBS News, Artnet News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post for his response to the Eaton Fire.
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
David Alekhuogie is an artist, educator, and photographer based in L.A. His work considers the role of the archive, photographic language, and translation in the construction of race, gender identity, and power.
Alekhuogie's work is in the collections of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York; the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts; the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.; The Getty; LACMA; Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
April Banks is a L.A.–based artist and strategist who creates public art and public activations. Her socially engaged practice time travels through historical archives and memories, questioning what we think we know of the past and how it informs our future identities.
April's work has been exhibited across the U.S., Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal, and Ethiopia. Her work is in the collections of the Getty Museum, the City of Santa Monica, L.A, County, and private collections. She was selected for a 2022 Fellowship for Visual Artist Award from the California Community Foundation. Her project, Braiding Water, received a 2022 California Humanities grant and in 2024 her project, Outlandish, originating at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, was funded by an NEA Our Town Grant.
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Scott Benzel is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in L.A. and is a faculty member of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. His work has been shown or performed at The Getty Museum; LACMA; Museum of Contemporary (MOCA), Los Angeles; LA><ART, Los Angeles; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Mt. Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, California; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; and was featured in The Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. 2012 and 2023 shows, as part of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive.
Benzel has organized exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Schindler House and Mackey House); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive; and Welcome Inn, Eagle Rock, California as part of the PST Art initiative organized by The Getty Museum.
Tuesday, October 28
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Enrique Castrejon is an artist working and living in L.A. His work explores mental and physical health, disease, and public health issues from marginalized communities. Using deconstructed imagery, research, and personal experience, he creates sculptural bodies that are mapped with public health records and interwoven lines.
His work has been shown at the Vincent Price Museum in Los Angeles; Los Angeles Municipal Gallery; Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, California; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California; Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, New York; Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland; and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico. Castrejon also received the City of Los Angeles Artist (COLA) Fellowship in 2019.
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff are an artist duo who have worked together for over a decade, developing a practice that is embedded in the founding and running of venues as sites of social and collaborative artistic work. They currently operate New Theater Hollywood, a black-box theatre in L.A. that produces experimental theatrical productions with artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and performers. Since opening, they have produced and hosted shows by, among others, Diamond Stingily, Asher Hartman, Stephanie LaCava, Casey Jane Ellison, Klein, Colin Self, Ian Svenonious, Jasmine Johnson, Karl Holmqvist/Arto Lindsay/Klara Liden, Ruby McCollister, and Lily McMenamy.
Henkel and Pitegoff's film, THEATER, made at New Theater Hollywood, is currently being shown in the Made in L.A. biennial at The Hammer Museum in L.A. Their work has been shown at O-Town House, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York, New York; Reena Spaulings, New York; Fluentum, Berlin, Germany; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany; MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; Cabinet, London, England; and others.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Katie Kirk is an artist living and working in L.A. She has exhibited her work across the U.S. and Europe and in spaces including the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California; the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, California; the Brand Library Art Center, Glendale, California; L.A. Mission College, Los Angeles; and Heaven Gallery Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her work is inspired by the body and a celebration of materials.
Amanda Ross-Ho
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Amanda Ross-Ho is an interdisciplinary artist and a Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. Her work reshapes the complex collateral of time into experimental archives, monuments, and discursive tableaus.
Her work has been shown at MOCA Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; and Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany, among others. Her public art commissions include Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Public Art Fund, New York, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
In Fall of 2025, Ross-Ho presented a newly commissioned work for the Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
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