Juan Carlos Rodriguez Rivera // Allison Yasukawa // International & Multilingual Students

Juan Carlos Rodriguez Rivera and Allison Yasukawa discuss international and multilingual students at art/design schools. Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera is a queer boricua visual communicator and educator, passionate about food, lover of gradients, and anything with glitter. Juan was born and raised in Cataño, the smallest town of Puerto Rico, but relocated to San Francisco, California in 2017. Juan’s work focuses on challenging colonial perspectives in design from the point of view of a boricua diaspora. Juan Carlos is an Assistant Professor in the Design Department at California College of the Arts, and holds an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in NY. Allison Yasukawa is a visual artist and educator. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. In her studio practice, she explores asymmetries of power and imagined geographies in interactional spaces ranging from the personal to the global. Yasukawa’s pedagogy focuses on studio and academic classes in English for Art and Design. She is the Director of English Language Learning at the California Institute of the Arts and has presented nationally and internationally on art-language overlaps in critique instruction, student autonomy, and multilingualism as a creative resource.