Staff

Ann Schnake, Executive Director
Ann Schnake is ArtsChange Founder and Artistic Director and is both a public artist and nurse practitioner. She has directed and curated the ArtsChange exhibition programs since its inception in 1996, developing themes and community interface, while both supporting the work of other artists and contributing her own work to ArtsChange. She also acts as a liaison to the world of healthcare and healing through her medical background and long-term relationship to community medicine. She also founded and directed the Bosnian Youth Art Project in Oakland and was a founder of Mudwomen and The United Clayworkers and currently creates installation work in other venues such as SOMARTS and Touchable Stories. Schnake studied at UC SantaCruz, UCBerkeley and UCSF with a shared background in art and medicine. She has been a Family Nurse Practitioner at the Richmond Health Center since 1989. 

Rosa Valdez, Associate Director
Rosa Valdez has worked with ArtsChange in a variety of capacities since 2006. She will be joining ArtsChange as Associate Director in early 2008 and will focus on youth programming, and fundraising. Rosa Valdez, is a first generation Mexican-American artist with a background in lens-based art and community activism. Rosa has worked with the communities of the East Bay for the last fourteen years. She worked on two community projects with Familias Unidas in Richmond and the Women Take Care, Take Action organization in Berkeley on programs that used photography to create awareness and change around women’s health and work issues. At Contra Costa Community College, she directed the College for Kids, Metas and the Tech Prep Multimedia Programs. She is a Co-Founder of CASA Salvemos Nuestros Pueblos, a multi-generational grassroots organization that came together to stop a dam project that would have flooded the homes of more than 10,000 people in Mexico – including the town where Rosa’s family is from. Most recently, she served as the Exhibitions Coordinator for the Richmond Art Center where she curated community-based exhibitions. Rosa earned her B.A. in Art from San Francisco State University and is currently an M.F.A. candidate at John F. Kennedy University. Her photography and video work explore Mexican and Mexican-American women’s roles, identities and narratives.

Tania Padilla, Artist in Resident
Tania Padilla is the director of the ArtsChange traveling puppet show and puppet program at Verde School, and works in all aspects of the ArtsChange Youth Food Works Project Tania Padilla is a San Francisco native focusing primarily in video and performance that integrate puppetry, artwork and animation. She received her BFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts and is the founder of Puppet Medicine. Through puppetry and storytelling she creates a surreal space where the appreciation of love, health, family and death can be explored within a world of visual poetry. Inspired by healers and the intricacies of human exchange, her artwork creates whimsical connections between the polarities of life.  Reality and fantasy, the living and dead, and the ordinary and spectacular live side by side in her creations.  She integrates imagery of the carnivalesque, mysticism and the global condition to provoke a compassionate and reflective experience for the viewer.  She is working on new bodies of puppetry work for ArtsChange as an artist in residence