Meet Our Team
Laura Pecenco, phd.
Founding director
Laura founded Project PAINT: The Prison Arts INiTiative in 2013. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at San Diego Miramar College; prior to this, she was an adjunct instructor at UC San Diego; University of San Diego; and San Diego Mesa College. She serves as Faculty Advisor for the Miramar Urban Scholars Union, an organization for formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students.
She has presented at academic and AIC conferences on the topic of arts in carceral spaces. In 2015, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, completing her dissertation on arts creation in prisons. Prior to founding Project PAINT, Laura worked in various capacities in prisons since 2003. She began her work as a tutor for a GED program at San Quentin State Prison, through a program run through the UC Berkeley. She was also a charter member of the Justice Arts Coalition and is a member of the RJDCF Warden’s Advisory Committee, the San Diego Reentry Roundtable and its Education Committee, the San Diego and Imperial Counties Community College Association Region X Restorative Justice Steering Committee, and the California Lawyers for the Arts San Diego Steering Committee.
Laura also owns her own jewelry company, and specializes in working with bronze and sterling silver, using a variety of metalsmithing techniques. She has curated arts in prison exhibitions at the Oceanside Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Glashaus Mainspace Gallery, Kruglak Gallery, Pikku Gallery, the Hill Street Country Club Gallery, Art Produce Gallery, Love Library, and inside RJ Donovan Correctional Facility. She earned her M.A. in Sociology from UC San Diego, and her B.A. in Sociology, with Highest Honors, from UC Berkeley.
Robin mcnulty
communications coordinator & teaching artist
Robin is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and nonprofit administrator who has exhibited and performed throughout North America, and has taught art inside six California state prisons. She is the recipient of research grants through universities and community based organizations, and currently teaches paper-based projects and printmaking at RJ Donovan.
In addition to Project PAINT, Robin leads the Fundraising taskforce with Justice Arts Coalition, a nationwide organization that supports currently and formerly incarcerated artists and prison arts programs. Previously, she was Deputy Director of Prison Arts Collective at San Diego State University, and worked in development at Second Chance, a nonprofit organization that helps justice-involved youth and adults achieve self-sufficiency. Robin is also a member of the Transformative In-Prison Workgroup (TPW), a coalition that advocates for rehabilitative in-prison programming. Robin earned her Master of Fine Arts from Tufts University and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia.
stephanie oldengarm
administrator
Stephanie grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where her love of the arts was lovingly fostered by incredible professionals throughout primary school. She was a semi-finalist for the Pennsylvania Governor’s School of the Arts in 2007 for visual arts. Following high school, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving out of Norfolk, Virginia. She moved to California in 2015, where she completed her undergraduate studies in Sociology: Law & Society (Miramar College, UC San Diego) and Masters in Education, Counseling (San Diego State University). She has worked throughout the San Diego Community College District in the AudioVisual, Library, and Institutional Research departments, and as a community college counselor for the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services and Rising Scholars programs. An enthusiastic advocate for the therapeutic power of the arts, she has most recently begun studio arts classes in life drawing & painting, with hopes of pursuing an Art Therapy Masters program in the next few years!
Brandy Caminy
Program Assistant
Brandy Caminy is a San Diego based artist and undergraduate Studio major at the University of California San Diego, with a focus on social practice arts (combining arts with social justice and advocacy). Her art aims to elevate the various experiences she has had across three states (CA MI & NY). She feels it’s important to emphasize the experiences she's had as a Latinx/Chicana foster youth so that viewers can understand the complex social issues which surround them in a more digestible way. She especially wants to work with incarcerated people as many of her friends and family have been directly impacted by the justice system. Her art has been featured in Marcescence Magazine, SD County Fair, City College Gallery, Promises 2 Kids, and at the San Diego Watercolor Society.
Teaching Artists
tarrah aroonsakool
Tarrah Aroonsakool is a multidisciplinary artist and dedicated arts educator with over 10 years of experience. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Loyola University, she specializes in incorporating found objects into her work, expanding beyond traditional painting to create large-scale mixed-media sculptures and installations using materials such as concrete, wire, cloth, and paper. Her work has been exhibited at art spaces including the San Diego Art Institute, Athenaeum, Hillstreet Country Club Gallery, The Front Arte & Cultura Gallery, and Teros Gallery.
As an arts educator, Aroonsakool is passionate about expanding access to the arts in underserved communities. She has collaborated with the City Heights Community Development Corporation to install public sculptures in low-income neighborhoods and has taught at nonprofit organizations such as Anna’s Arts for Kids, where she led after-school programs for children. At Project Lazarus, she served as the program art coordinator, providing creative support for individuals living with HIV and AIDS. Currently, she teaches at Project PAINT, working with people who are living in incarceration, and runs a studio space that offers mentorship and resources to queer artists.
morgan mandalay
Morgan Mandalay is an artist and sometimes-curator based in Southern California. He has worked with Project PAINT for the past five years teaching classes focused on painting, visual storytelling, and exhibition making. Additionally, he manages California Lawyers for the Arts’ arts-focused reentry program, Designing Creative Futures in San Diego, CA. Morgan's practices as an artist, educator and program administrator are grounded in his own experiences with the adult criminal legal system as a teenager, dealing with themes of growth, shame, surveillance and the lifelong struggle (and potential impossibility) of coming to terms with one's past.
Morgan’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Wild Palms (Dusseldorf, GER), Klowden Mann (Los Angeles, CA), Extase (Chicago, IL), and BWSMX (Mexico City, MEX) among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Best Practice (San Diego, CA), Flag Foundation (New York, NY), 1969 Gallery (New York, NY), The Valley (Taos, NM), Deslave (Tijuana, MEX), H.G. Inn (Chicago, IL), Bahamas Biennale (Detroit, MI), DAMA (Turin, ITA), and Kimberly Klark (Queens, NY). He was a 2018 Fellow of Shandaken Project’s Paint School in New York, NY, and has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Hyperallergic among other publications. Morgan has founded a number of interstitial curatorial platforms including SPF15 on the beaches of San Diego, Fresh Bread in his kitchen, Date Night at Horton Plaza Mall and most recently K.I.T.E. with Project PAINT participants on C yard and E yard at RJ Donovan Correctional Facility.
ruben Radillo
Ruben has been making art in different ways his whole life and while at incarcerated at RJ Donovan, Ruben participated in many Project PAINT classes. After returning to his community, he successfully turned his passion for art into a career as a professional tattoo artist. In addition to working at the shop and helping create distance learning lessons, Ruben participates in a writing group with Playwright's Project. Ruben’s art has been included in Future IDs at Alcatraz, Iron City Magazine, and an exhibition and mural inside RJD.
