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Adjunct Professor of Digital Art
Emma Akmakdjian is a mixed media installation artist and sculptor whose transdisciplinary
practice inquires how art can be involved in the process of environmental restoration.
Her teaching philosophy is to build connections across disciplines through visual
communication and fine motor skills that explore knowledge growth through experiential
learning.
She received her MFA from UCLA in Design | Media Arts with a certificate in Leaders
of Sustainability and a scuba diving certification in AAUS American Academy of Underwater
Sciences. She pursued her Bachelor of Arts from California State University Channel
Islands. https://emmaakmakdjian.com/works/
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Adjunct Professor of Digital Art
Kathy is an LA-based art director. designer, and educator with extensive experience
in key art and entertainment design, retouching/compositing work, and general graphic
design. She holds a BFA in Studio Art with a Photography concentration from Smith
College and an MFA in Graphic Design from the California Institute of the Arts. She
has taught at Cal Poly Pomona and Pepperdine University.
Past clients include Netflix, HBO, Amazon Studios, Universal Studios, A24, Magnolia
Pictures, and more. When not working, Kathy is likely watching Real Housewives, crafting,
or talking to her three cats.
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 Adjunct Professor of Sculpting
Richard Bott is an artist and educator living in Los Angeles. His production works
across genres employing video, performance, media installation, painting, and drawing.
His work has been notably presented by the Hammer Museum as part of Made in LA : Los
Angeles Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, and
a solo show at China Art Objects Los Angeles. Bott is also part of the performance/installation
duo, Animal Charm, a collaboration between Bott and Jim Fetterley, which began using
found VHS tapes and computers to make video collages for single channel screenings
and multimedia performances in 1995. Bott received his BFA from The School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA from University of California San Diego.
With the advent of YouTube a decade away, the artists culled bins of dead and devalued
media, including industrial and promotional videos, bargain vinyl LPs, and consumer-
grade electronics. They then combined disparate footage, using early nonlinear video
editing software to create unsettling, humorous, and critical works. The duo compose
unexpected juxtapositions in an attempt to subvert the original intentions of the
found videos and to expose their absurdity while eliciting new meanings from the detritus
of culture. Since 2000, these video collages have been centerpieces presented in various
exhibition spaces as video installations, often including live performances in these
temporary theatrical settings. Bott received his Bachelors of Fine Art from The School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his Masters of Fine Art from the University of
California San Diego. Bott received the Golden Gate Award for New Visions Category
San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Silver Hugo for Experimental Video
Chicago International Film Festival.
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 Adjunct Professor of Sculpting, Explorations in Ceramics
Monica Chapopn, Adjunct Professor of Studio Art. Taught in the Fine Arts Division
from 2012 to the present.
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 Adjunct Professor of Studio Art
John Emison is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. His practice includes
sculpture, drawing, painting, and video. His work often takes the form of subtle alterations,
shifts of register, and added information. He received an MFA in sculpture from Tyler
School of Art, Temple University, and a BA in art & art history and sociology & anthropology
from Colgate University.
He has shown in galleries and institutions including MIM Gallery (Los Angeles), Spring/Break
Art Show (Los Angeles), Ms Barbers (Los Angeles), Central Park (Los Angeles), Tiger
Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles), the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
(Philadelphia), and 808 Gallery, Boston University. He also brings extensive experience
working in Los Angeles and New York galleries and institutions to the studio classroom.
He has taught at Pepperdine University since 2019.
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 Adjunct Professor of Film
Dr. Beverly Graf is an Adjunct Faculty Member who teaches Classical Mythology and
Film & Television Studies (including Film as Art, Film Genre, Film History, Film Theory,
Language of Film, Story Development, Story Analysis and Antiquity on Film) at Pepperdine,
UCLA, and CSUN. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Classics from Princeton University
and her B.A. from Dartmouth College. Before teaching full time, she worked as V.P.
of Development for Abilene Pictures where they produced several features and television
projects including Primal Fear, Frequency, Fallen, Fracture and NYPD 2069. Her near-future-mystery-novel,
GENESYS X, featuring Detectives Piedmont & Miyaguchi, was published 11/10/2020 by
Fairwood Press and is currently at work on a female-driven mystery set in Augustan
Rome. Dr. Graf also has a few scholarly articles (including Arya, Katnis & Merida:
Empowering Girls Through the Amazonian Archetype and The Femme Fatale in Passion of
the Christ) and 6 short stories published: Deus ex Machina, Sandman, Blood Shadows
and Shikata Ga Nai, Servant of the Place of Truth, and Overheated and has three more
out for consideration.
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 Adjunct Professor of Digital Art
Eli Joteva is a Bulgarian intermedia artist, researcher and educator. Joteva has exhibited
internationally across Europe, the US, Asia, the Middle East and Australasia including
at Ars Electronica, Linz; Noor Riyadh, Riyadh; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Fosun
Foundation, Shanghai, and the Queensland Centre for Photography, Newstead. She has
been a resident artist at STEAM Imaging III with Ars Electronica & Fraunhofer MEVIS,
Vermont Studio Centre, ACRE, and a member of UCLA Art Sci Centre | Lab. Her work has
been included in DA Fest, xCoax, Currents New Media, SciArt Initiative, ComeAlive,
and GOGBOT, amongst others. Joteva holds a BA from USC Roski, an MFA from UCLA, and
completed The New Normal postgraduate research program at Strelka Institute for Media,
Architecture, and Design. Most recently she was a Visualization Research Artist at
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Currently she is a visiting lecturer
at Southern California Institute of Architecture and an adjunct professor at Laguna
College of Art and Design and Pepperdine University in Los Angeles.
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 Adjunct Professor of Studio Art
Michael Kennedy Costa (b. 1982, Northampton, MA) is an artist, poet, and educator
who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work is primarily rooted in drawing, ranging
from automatic line drawing to intensely worked color pencil drawings on built paper
supports.
Kennedy Costa received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011 and a
BFA from Boston University in 2006. His work has been exhibited at Hunter Shaw Fine
Art, Los Angeles; Bad Water, Knoxville; Simian, Copenhagen; Franz Kaka, Toronto; u’s,
Calgary; Roger’s Office, Los Angeles; and Sydney, Sydney. He has forthcoming solo
and group shows at Human Resources, Los Angeles and CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain
de Bordeaux. His first book of poems will be published in Fall of 2023. He has taught
drawing and painting at Pepperdine since 2022.
https://www.michaelkennedycosta.com/
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 Adjunct Professor of Digital Art
Renée Reizman is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. She coauthors dialogues
in diverse communities to study the ways infrastructures shape our culture, policy,
and environment. Renée has engaged with the public through the Los Angeles Department
of Transportation, Kolaj Institute, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, The Feminist
Center for Creative Work, 826LA, Antelope Valley College, and Machine Project. Her
writing appears in Art in America, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vice, Teen Vogue,
InStyle, Chicago Magazine, Slate, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, The Awl, and more. Renée
holds an MFA in Critical & Curatorial Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
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 Adjunct Professor of Studio Art
In his large-scale oil and watercolor paintings, Conrad Ruiz (b. 1983, Monterey Park,
CA) delves into the concept of machismo. His fantastical works, oscillating between
figurative and abstract, have captured freeze-frame instances of stirring sporting
events, amusement park thrills, and mass group exercises in attack strategies that
often situate the male figure in actions that bolster his heroic status. Ruiz’s references
to history painting converge with pop culture imagery—drawn from the entertainment
industry of Los Angeles where he currently lives—and are interwoven with aspects of
his personal experience growing up as a teenager in nearby Hacienda Heights. Says
Ruiz in an interview with VICE magazine, “One thing I’m constantly thinking about
when I’m making work is the ultimate boy-zone, like comic books, video games, fantasy,
and sci-fi.” In so doing, his paintings are imbued with a familiar range of adolescent
impulses bound up in ever-complicated politicized issues of sexual identity, body
image, competitive drive, and willingness to conform.
Charged with power and desire, the works, while challenging fraught stereotypes of
masculinity, confront a highly mediated range of seductive forces that influence how
identity becomes performed in contemporary culture.
Conrad Ruiz received his MFA from the California College of Arts in 2009. He has participated
in numerous museum exhibitions in the U.S. and Mexico. Ruiz’s work is part of public
and private collections that include the Berkeley Art Museum; ArtNow International,
San Francisco; and the Peggy Cooper-Cafritz
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 Adjunct Professor of Studio Art
Kira Maria Shewfelt received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from New York University,
her M.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California, and B.A. in Comparative
Literature from Yale University. She has taught undergraduate courses at NYU and Pepperdine
University, as well as courses for local and international arts outreach programs
including Proyecto Sitie, ArtWorxLA, Inner City Arts, and LAUSD’s Gifted and Talented
program and considers social reflection and impact an important part of her practice.
She has presented research on contemporary political graphics at the University of
Versailles Saint Quentin and University College London and curates alternative outdoor
exhibitions and artistic reunions through a venture entitled, alt.a.mira projects.
Her painting engages elements of storytelling and a translation of personal into shared
experience. Taking influence from the literary and visual genres of Magical Realism,
Symbolism and Romanticism, her work engages physical-spiritual unions, tangible, often
athletic existentialism, and metaphor as a vulnerable offering for connection. She
has shown across the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco
Chicago and Miami, and internationally in Rio de Janeiro. Recent exhibitions include
“Telescoping” with False Cast Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, “A Peripheral Reverie,” with
Penske Projects, Montecito, CA, and “So Far,” and “Hot Tropics” with La Loma Projects,
Pasadena, CA.
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 Adjunct Professor of Sculpting
Kim Truong is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work examines relationships between
aesthetic, content, and language through scenes of groupings, which often rendered
in modes recalling sense of alienation and of loss. The recurring themes often include
social margins, memory, and diaspora displayed as sculptural installations contextualized
to create dialogues examining the relationship between individuals and community.
The works call attention to the adverse results of globalization. She received an
MFA from UCLA and a BA from CSULA.
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