What’s My Thesis?

South African interdisciplinary artist Azole, an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, discusses architecture, photography, drawing, portraiture, artistic ethics, and the transition from professional practice in South Africa to graduate study in Los Angeles.

Javier Proenza speaks with Greek visual artist and Fulbright Scholar Ioanna Sakellaraki about photography, archival practice, grief, Greek mourning rituals, and building a contemporary art practice across Europe, Australia, and the United States.

Kristine Shomaker, founder of Shoebox Arts and Art and Cake at the Brewery Art Complex in Los Angeles, discusses conceptual painting, collaboration, nonprofit structures, and sustaining artists through projects like Perceive Me and Color Response.

Ceramic sculptor and installation artist Liz Stringer discusses monumental sculpture, embodiment, biopolitics, and public ritual, tracing how medicine, architecture, and lived bodily experience shape her contemporary ceramic practice.

Artist and exhibition coordinator Stephanie Sherwood discusses painting on found materials, working inside municipal art institutions, artist collectives, and sustaining a practice between public service, community, and contemporary painting in Los Angeles.

Ecuadorian-born artist Joaquin Stacey discusses identity, Catholic iconography, migration, and process, tracing a practice shaped between Quito, Miami, and Los Angeles following his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design.

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 development as an artist. A pivotal high-school teacher introduced him to portfolio building and ultimately to the CalArts CAP program—a transformational moment that opened a different pathway into art, community, and education. Throughout the episode, Bracamonte reflects on moving from name-based graffiti to narrative, community-oriented mural work; researching Mayan hieroglyphs; and developing a hybrid visual language that holds both ancestral history and futurist possibility. The discussion expands outward into questions of Latinx identity, diaspora, public art, youth mentorship, and the politics of presence—what it means to show up in spaces that often assume you don’t belong. Bracamonte’s reflections move between personal history and broader frameworks of street culture, muralism, pedagogy, and the ongoing transformation of LA’s art landscape. This episode offers a direct, unfiltered look at how artistic practices emerge from lived experience, community ties, and the need to create meaning beyond institutional boundaries.

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 conversation, Camarillo reflects on rejecting the label of “artist,” his experience with exploitation in fashion and sweatshops, and the deep political stakes of textiles in shaping both history and everyday life. The dialogue explores craft versus fine art, sustainability, gentrification in Lincoln Heights and El Sereno, and the importance of teaching weaving, dyeing, and self-reliance through Grow Lincoln Heights and his brand Dust of Course. With a Fulbright in Japan to study indigo farming, Camarillo embodies a practice that is at once monastic, technical, and communal—insisting on fundamentals in a moment dominated by spectacle and commodification.