Interdisciplinary artist Manny Valdez joins What's My Thesis? to discuss his participatory practice, recent projects, and experiences as an MFA graduate from Otis College of Art and Design. Drawing on performance, installation, screen printing, and artist participation, Valdez examines how artists construct identity, navigate institutional structures, and create opportunities within the contemporary Los Angeles art world.

The conversation explores the realities of art education, grant applications, rejection, networking, retail labor, and teaching, alongside broader questions about artistic ambition, community, and sustaining a practice outside conventional career pathways. Throughout, Valdez reflects on the value of collaboration, resilience, and creating work that invites dialogue rather than certainty.

Javier Proenza speaks with Ioanna Sakellaraki, a Greek visual artist, photographer, and Fulbright Scholar currently conducting research with the Smithsonian, about the development of her interdisciplinary practice across photography, collage, embroidery, and archival work.

The conversation examines Sakellaraki’s transition from a career in communications strategy with EU institutions into contemporary art, the influence of personal grief and the discovery of her late father’s archive on her work, and her engagement with Greek mourning traditions, Orthodox ritual, memory, and the unstable boundary between documentary and conceptual image-making.

For the 300th episode of What’s My Thesis?, Javier Proenza is joined by Los Angeles-based artists and cultural workers Dakota Noot and Christopher Anthony Velasco for an informal conversation shaped by friendship, shared history, and long experience in contemporary art communities. The discussion reflects on public visibility, social media hostility, reputation, and the shifting dynamics of creative life in increasingly online cultural spaces.

The episode also examines practical questions of artistic survival, including teaching, freelance writing, collaborative creative work, and the limitations of traditional institutional pathways. Moving between humor and critical reflection, the conversation offers a grounded portrait of how artists build careers, relationships, and parallel forms of legitimacy outside conventional gallery structures.

In this episode, Dave Young Kim, a Los Angeles–based muralist and curator, discusses his recent exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. Developed around the theme of Asian mythical creatures, the project reframes historical material through the structure of the immigrant experience, pairing objects from the museum’s collection with contemporary artworks and newly commissioned pieces.

Kim reflects on the research process behind the exhibition, including the cultural specificity of pan-Asian mythologies and their evolution across regions. The conversation also addresses Korean American identity, family migration histories, and the challenges of curating within institutional frameworks, alongside the practical considerations of maintaining a sustainable art practice beyond traditional gallery systems.

Snezana Petrovic, a Yugoslav-born painter, installation artist, and former production designer, joins What’s My Thesis? to discuss her early career across film and theater in Yugoslavia and her forced migration to California during the country’s collapse in the early 1990s. She reflects on the loss of a national identity, the experience of displacement, and the complexities of being categorized within new cultural and political frameworks in the United States.

The conversation traces the evolution of her artistic practice from painting and production design to concept-driven installation work shaped by ecological concerns, environmental damage, and global interdependence. Petrovic also discusses the influence of performance art, her time in India and engagement with spiritual frameworks, and how these experiences informed her shift toward art as a space for awareness, reflection, and dialogue around shared human conditions.

Joe Galarza is a Los Angeles-based muralist, musician, and community educator whose practice engages Indigenous identity, political resistance, and the social role of art. Introduced through the East L.A. punk scene, Galarza traces his early influences from heavy metal illustration to anarchist thought, and later to Indigenous-led movements shaped by land struggles, NAFTA-era organizing, and Zapatista philosophy.

The conversation examines art as a tool for education and collective questioning, with Galarza reflecting on his work with incarcerated youth, mural practices that preserve oral histories, and the persistence of colonial structures in contemporary life. Throughout, he situates his work within a broader commitment to community, emphasizing the responsibility of artists to engage with systemic injustice while remaining accountable to the histories and territories they inhabit.

In this episode, photographer Josh Schaedel discusses his work founding and sustaining an artist-run exhibition space in Los Angeles, reflecting on a practice rooted in service, hospitality, and access for emerging artists. He addresses the material and economic realities of photography, including the costs of production and framing, and the structural challenges that limit broader institutional support for the medium.

The conversation also considers the impact of digital tools and AI on photographic practice, alongside Schaedel's approach to teaching, which emphasizes tactile engagement through prints and photobooks. Throughout, he situates photography as a medium shaped by constraint and grounded in reality, while advocating for independent spaces and publishing as critical frameworks for sustaining artistic communities.

Artist Donel Williams reflects on his unconventional path into art, from community college photography to his studies at UCLA, where he developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, performance, and installation. Drawing on personal history and mentorship, he describes how early experiences shaped his engagement with labor, material, and image-making.

The conversation centers on the expectations placed on Black artists within contemporary art, particularly the pressure toward figuration, and Williams’ turn toward abstraction as both a formal and political strategy. Through work informed by redacted government documents and performative gestures that critique authorship and visibility, he examines the tensions between identity, audience legibility, and artistic autonomy.

Faris McReynolds is a painter and musician whose practice engages directly with the structures of the contemporary art world. In this conversation, he reflects on his early entry into the gallery system, the financial realities of sustaining a painting practice, and the conditions that led him to step away from commercial representation.

The discussion addresses how wealth, collectors, and market forces shape artistic visibility and value, alongside a critique of galleries, art fairs, and institutional power. McReynolds also considers the distinction between underground and unsuccessful practices, the influence of social media on artistic production, and the possibility of maintaining an independent, long-term commitment to making work outside dominant systems.

In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, Los Angeles painter Jahn Baby Muller, a graduate of the USC Roski School of Art, joins host Javier Proenza to discuss his thesis work and the philosophical questions shaping his practice. Muller describes a body of still life paintings built from objects collected at estate sales—particularly toys and artifacts left behind by the Baby Boomer generation—which he stages as emotional narratives about generational inheritance and cultural memory.

The conversation expands into a broader reflection on how art is defined and experienced. Muller proposes that art is not determined solely by the artist’s intention but emerges through the experience of the viewer and the cultural context surrounding it. Alongside discussions of art education and institutional hierarchies, he explains how his work combines painting, large-format photography, video-game color palettes, and extended poetic titles to explore nostalgia, generational power, and the material remnants of previous generations.