Team
Sue Bell Yank, Executive Director
Sue Bell Yank is a writer, curator, educator, and arts administrator, and is formerly the Deputy Director at 18th Street Arts Center. She has worked in arts, entertainment, and public schools for nearly 20 years, including as Associate Director of Academic Programs at the Hammer Museum, where she formed city-wide partnerships triangulating communities, the arts, and schools. She created an online education platform for the Oprah Winfrey Network, and has worked as a teacher and curriculum specialist in and out of public schools. Her expertise lies in art with social impact, public art installations, cultural programming with community partnerships, strategic communications and digital marketing, and organizational strategy. Her interest in urban planning and affordable cities led her to create a six-episode podcast about housing in Los Angeles called Paved Paradise. She teaches at UCLA, frequently writes about socially engaged art practice and pedagogy, and has been a Field Researcher for A Blade of Grass and Asian Arts Initiative. She is the Chair of the City of Glendale Arts & Culture Commission, and has consulted with a wide range of nonprofits on audience development, strategic planning, and visioning in the arts under the auspices of the California Arts Council, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the City of West Hollywood. Yank received a BA from Harvard University and an MA in Public Art Studies from the University of Southern California.
Julia Meltzer, Founder and Senior Advisor of Community and Government Partnerships
Julia Meltzer comes from a large Los Angeles family who nurtured her belief that art transforms communities. As the Founding Director of Clockshop, she has worked for over two decades creating opportunities for artists and audiences to come together on public land. Thousands of Angelenos have had access to arts and culture through Clockshop’s programs, along the LA River and beyond. Meltzer’s work as an artist and filmmaker has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Toronto International Film Festival, among many other venues; her two feature documentaries, ‘The Light In Her Eyes and Dalya’s Other Country,’ were broadcast nationally on PBS’s POV series. She was a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a Senior Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria.
julia.meltzer [at] clockshop.org | juliameltzerfilms.com | meltzerthorne.com
Cat Yang, Director of Artist Projects
Cat Yang lives and works in Los Angeles. She is a curator, cultural worker, and writer. Yang is interested in exploring liminality, inflection points, and interstitial spaces where self-determination is emergent. Yang is on the Steering Committee of GYOPO and received a BA from UCLA in Geography.
Katie Janss, Development Manager
Katie Janss (she/her) is a programs, operations, and fundraising professional based in Los Angeles / Tongvaland. She is the Development Manager at Clockshop, where she oversees the organization’s individual giving program. She also volunteers as the Director of Operations at The Chapter House, an Indigenous arts and community space based in Los Angeles and on the Navajo Nation. She was recently the Program Operations Manager for the Navajo Water Project at DigDeep, where she started the Water Is Life Fund, a microgrant program aimed towards funding community-led grassroots water access projects on the Navajo Nation. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Darío Herrera, Community Programs Manager
Caroline Kanner, Youth and Family Programs Manager
Caroline Kanner is an educator from Los Angeles. She has worked as a teacher, museum educator, and curriculum designer in Connecticut, Texas, Alabama, and California. Most recently, she taught second grade with LAUSD in Koreatown. She loves making art and being outdoors with young people, and is passionate about creating learning spaces where kids and teens can build their power. Caroline holds a BA from Yale University and an M.Ed from UCLA.
Rhombie Sandoval, Communications and Social Media Manager
Rhombie Sandoval is a photographer and storyteller currently residing in Southern California. Her entry into photography started after receiving a camera as a gift from the Make A Wish Foundation, a gesture arranged on her behalf due to being born with heart disease. With the camera, Sandoval realized she could navigate her shyness and connect with people using the camera as a tool to understand various vantage points, searching for and highlighting the common themes linked to one’s identity and location. Sandoval later studied Photography at Art Center College of Design. She is also the founder of Anywhere Blvd, a platform which features portrait photographers by promoting the narratives of their subjects.
Isabel Yi Jimenez, Project Associate
Isabel Yi Jimenez is an artist and cultural worker based in Los Angeles. Their work mines the site of place and cultural memory in an attempt to disentangle the question of where the individual stands in reference to the collective, and this practice wherein sociality is inherent to art-making guides their commitment to community-based engagement and activism. They work with the editorial team at the Los Angeles Review of Books and received a BFA in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts.
Hugo Garcia, Director of Community Engagement
Hugo Garcia is the Clockshop Director of Community Engagement. Hugo also serves as the Campaign Coordinator for Environmental Justice at Esperanza Community Housing. He brings over 30 years of community organizing and engagement experience across several environmental and social justice campaigns throughout the City of Los Angeles. He specializes in building strategic partnerships and successful organizing strategies. A lifelong resident of East Los Angeles, Hugo also has experience in teaching and employment development, having served as Director of the 2nd largest youth employment development program in the city of Los Angeles.
Collaborators
Ivanna Baranova, Grantwriter
Gina Clyne, Primary Freelance Photographer
Isa Eugenio, Graphic Designer
Adrian Garcia, Freelance Sound Engineer
Mathew Scott, Take Me to Your River, Primary Freelance Photographer
Chris Tyler, Grantwriter
Chris Votek, Primary Sound Engineer
Board Members
Andy Wong, President
Andy Wong has served on the Clockshop Board of Directors since spring of 2021 and has been Board President since spring of 2022. He is a Senior Vice President, Associate General Counsel, at Paramount Global and is counsel for the CBS Television Network, practicing media law shortly after graduating from UCLA School of Law in 2000. Andy is also a graduate of University of California at Berkeley. Born in Hong Kong, Andy immigrated to Los Angeles at a young age and is a proud Angeleno.
Mia Locks, Vice-President
Mia is an independent curator and executive director of Museums Moving Forward, a data-driven research organization dedicated to increasing equity and diversity in the art museum sector.
Ignacio Perez Meruane, Secretary
Ignacio Perez Meruane is a Chilean artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His sculptural work focuses on how colonialism, and by extension global capitalism, impresses upon culture and our environment. His work has been shown at Craft Contemporary, Torrance Art Museum, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and Galeria Tajamar in Santiago, Chile. In addition to his practice as an artist, he organizes the Palestinian reading group at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Perez Meruane received a B.F.A. in General Sculptural Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts.
Meldia Yesayan, Treasurer
Meldia is the Director of OXY ARTS, the multidisciplinary arts center and program initiative at Occidental College. She was instrumental in the new building renovation, the opening of the center, and shaping the organizational identity and programming strategy for the initiative. Meldia is responsible for all exhibitions and programs at the center, facilitating visiting artist residencies, initiating cross-departmental and interdisciplinary collaborations, and engaging the Occidental community in socially conscious discourse with contemporary arts practices. Additionally, she actively engages with the Los Angeles arts scene, fostering valuable partnerships with local agencies, artists, and institutions.
Claire Bowin, Board Member
Throughout her career, Claire Bowin has focused on supporting sustainable and collaborative community building efforts. Claire’s multi-decade career has included a variety of community focused activities ranging from community organizing, to affordable housing development, to open space and transportation policy, to the design of green school yards, college campus improvements, and public parks.
Vali Chandrasekaran, Board Member
Vali Chandrasekaran is a television and screenwriter who has worked on MODERN FAMILY and 30 ROCK, and is author of the Eisner nominated graphic novel, GENIUS ANIMALS? Before coming to Hollywood, Vali studied computer science and was editor of the Harvard Lampoon. He and his wife Nithya Raman have twin second graders and live in Silver Lake.
York Chang, Board Member
York Chang (b. St. Louis, MO, lives and works in Los Angeles) received his J.D. at UCLA, and works as both a union-side labor lawyer and a visual artist. Chang has exhibited his work at various institutions, galleries, and fairs in the U.S. and internationally. He was the recipient of a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2014), the Vincent Price Art Museum’s Thomas Silliman Vanguard Award (2020), and the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Master Artist Fellowship (2022). From 2005-2013, Chang also served on the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission (president from 2009-2013), where he oversaw the public art commissions and public architecture design for the City of Los Angeles, and helped to establish a public-private grants partnership for emerging artists.
Ayasha Guerin, Board Member
Dr. Ayasha Guerin (they/she) is assistant professor of intersectionality and practice-based research and media making in the department of World Arts & Cultures/ Dance at UCLA. They are an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose research and creative practices center socio-ecological histories, connecting human and animal experience through questions of relational reciprocity, and are a founding member of the Berlin-based research collective, curating through conflict with care (CCC), which uses conflict and contradiction as a methodology for identifying and revealing the paradoxes of inclusive curating. In 2023 they founded the Liberated Planet Studio, for artists and activists interested in ecological research and somatic experiments to mobilize discourse about the intersections of environmental and social exploitation.
Kevin Kane, Board Member
Kevin Kane is a design focused entrepreneur and a founding partner at Arktura and NOWN, whose passion for design is driven by the desire to create environments that evoke specific emotions through experience, materiality, and interaction. Trained as an architect, he continues to work closely with clients and artists to set new standards for creative problem solving and manufacturing innovation in the installation and architectural worlds.
Kristina Kite, Board Member
Kristina Kite is a gallery owner, curator, writer, and art historian working in Los Angeles. She has been an active member of the Los Angeles art community for over 20 years. She is also a founding member of the Artists Acquisition Club, a group of artists, writers, and curators who collectively purchase and gift significant artworks by influential “artists’ artists” to major institutions.
Cynthia Vargas, Board Member
Cynthia Vargas is a curator, researcher, educator, and founder of Stairwell, an experimental art space and residency housed in a domestic space in the Westlake-MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Her practice encourages curiosity, generosity, and well-being. Cynthia also serves on the board of Barnsdall Arts.
