Artists + Practitioners + Organizations

Meet the artists, practitioners, and organizations! Far South/Border North awarded funding to support artists and cultural practitioners working in disciplines from performing arts, visual arts, music, film and media, and literature to multidisciplinary and socially engaged forms.

Far South/Border North Round I Grant Recipients

Our Round I grant recipients include about 60 artists and cultural practitioners from San Diego and Imperial counties. Round I grant recipients began developing their campaigns in June 2023, and are now implemented those campaigns through May 2024.

Cat Chiu Phillips

San Diego County

Cat Chiu Phillips creates installation work in public spaces, often using traditional handicraft methods, including crochet, weaving, and embroidery. She often uses discarded materials, including plastic and electronic waste, to create large-scale installations and public art projects.  Growing up in Manila, she was inspired by resilience through tragedy and a sense of resourcefulness. Phillips has received numerous national public art commissions and artwork in the Civic Art Collection of the City of San Diego and Redmond (WA) and has been awarded the California Arts Council's Established Artist Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts.  She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master of Science in Special Education.  She has been an educator in public schools for over 23 years, a Filipino-Chinese American, adjunct professor, public artist, USMC veteran wife, and mother.

Isaac Artenstein

San Diego County

Isaac Artenstein is a filmmaker and educator who grew up in Tijuana and Chula Vista, studied at the University of California Los Angeles, and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from CalArts. He founded Cinewest to create documentaries and indie features focusing on the border and Latin America, such as "Break of Dawn," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Artenstein produced the comedy "A Day Without a Mexican" and created internationally distributed documentaries such as "Ballad of an Unsung Hero" and "The Hidden Jews of the Southwest." A founding member of the Border Arts Workshop, he produced and directed "Border Brujo" and "Christmas at the Reservation" with performance artists Guillermo Gómez Peña and James Luna. His recent "The Journeys of Harry Crosby" premiered on PBS and Canal 22 (Mexico's Cultural TV). He's currently producing "Border Noir" about crime fiction writers in the region and teaching film at the University of California San Diego.

Yvette Roman

San Diego County

Yvette Roman is a bi-national artist, curator, muralist, and arts educator.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts and Cultural Anthropology from the University of California San Diego and a Museums Studies Certificate from Mesa College.  Yvette is passionate about making art accessible through community-organized collaboration.  Her artistic journey explores simplicity and chaos, interwoven with personal narratives of loss, self-discovery, and acceptance. Yvette's disciplines include painting, textiles, printmaking, and collage. In 2022, she collaborated on a public art project titled "Collective Memory," facilitated by the City of San Diego (Park Social). At A Reason to Survive, Roman assumes the roles of Curator and Lead Teaching Artists, nurturing the next generation of artistic minds.  She co-founded Residencia Ranchito Aurora (RRA). RRA aims to unite artists from both sides of the border to foster learning, collaboration, and innovation. Currently, she is undertaking a fellowship at RISE San Diego.

Dinah Poellnitz

San Diego County

Dinah Poellnitz is a curator and creative director, recognized as a leader for her arts programming in Oceanside's art and cultural district and a San Diego county leader in art curation and art education; she brings twelve years of experience in driving the development of communal partnerships, art exhibitions, and social impact programs across local communities. Throughout her tenure, Poellnitz gained a depth of knowledge in delivering the best-curated experiences through artist engagement and building partnerships with political organizers, students, artists, businesses, public institutions, and residents. In addition to her expertise, She is deeply committed to building thriving art communities and art event programming across Southern California.

Olivia Quintanilla

San Diego County

Olivia Arlene Quintanilla is a Chamoru educator born and raised in San Diego. Her cultural practice focuses on intergenerational public ethnic studies programming that centers on civic and community engagement. She organizes workshops and events that use culture, such as food, music, dance, poetry, art, and storytelling, as a catalyst for connection, awareness, and social change. A first-generation college student alumni of San Diego community colleges, San Diego State University, and the University of California San Diego, she is now an Ethnic Studies professor at MiraCosta Community College in Oceanside.

Juan Manuel Escalante

San Diego County

Juan Manuel Escalante is a designer and an artist working with computer code, modular synthesizers, and analog drawings. His work has been shown internationally and featured in major festivals and exhibitions, including Ars Electronica, Athens Digital Arts, OFFF, Mutek, Currents New Media, Binario, and Ceremonia, amongst others. He was a member of the National System of Art Creators (National Endowment for the Arts, MX) and received the Corwin Award (1st prize) for Electronic-Acoustic Composition in 2016. He has taught creative programming at the University of California Santa Barbara and various higher education institutions in Mexico, including the graduate program in Architecture (UNAM), where he founded and directed its Media Lab for eight years. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Technology (UCSB) and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Visual Arts at California State University, Fullerton.

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Far South/Border North Round II Grant Recipients

Our Round II grant recipients include 18 San Diego and Imperial County organizations. In fall 2023, they hired artists and cultural practitioners and began working alongside them to develop their campaigns, and implemented them through August 2024.

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