Niku Kashef is a multidisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. Her process stems from the desire to question and understand through exploration. Often her artwork deals with ideas of displacement and the uncanny, perhaps as a result of the many migrations she made as a child. Her work employs a wide range of new media and traditional techniques including photography, installation and book-making. Niku has shown work at the Monterey Museum of Art, The Museum of Arts & Crafts (Itami, Japan), Symbol Art Gallery (Budapest, Hungary), the Washington Gallery (Wash. DC) and across the Southern California region. She serves on CAA’s Student and Emerging Professionals Committee and as Special Projects Chair for SCWCA. With an MFA in Visual Communication, she is currently an adjunct at both California State Northridge and Woodbury Universities.

Anita Van Tellengen is a visual artist, professional musician and poet. She has a music degree from Westminister Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey and still sings professionally. She made her living for many years working in finance including serving as an accountant at the Screen Actors Guild for 22 years. Her colorful paintings and sculptures have been shown broadly in the Los Angeles region. Her artistic intent is to provide a visual bridge between the conscious world of everyday life and the unconscious, esoteric world of imagination, which is often hidden even in dreams. She has studied art privately for many years with Estella Gullatt and Cynthia Ebin. Anita belongs to the Collage Artists of America Women's Painter's West and the L.A. Experimental Artists. She paints and lives in the San Fernando Valley.

Libby Hartigan, a nonprofit consultant, is a mixed media artist. Previously employed as an editor at a teen newspaper and as a reporter at the Daily News of Los Angeles, she earned a comparative literature degree at Brown University and studied as a Rotary Fellow at the Universidad Javeriana Pontificia de Colombia in Bogota. As Grants and Fundraising Chair for SCWCA, she has written five successful grants on behalf of the organization, worked on several individual donor campaigns and done press outreach.

Avinger Nelson is a photographer and experimental artist. She loves combining media and techniques then recombining and altering them until they express what she sees in the world around her. She also collects and assembles found objects into "dolls" that represent human traits and needs. Avinger's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout Southern California. Her work is included in corporate and private collections across the southern United States from California to Florida. Prior to going back to college to study photography and art, Avinger owned a management and leadership training company. Currently, Avinger is Programs Chair for SCWCA and serves on the national WCA board. She is also Program Chair for the Collage Artists of America and Exhibition Coordinator and a group leader for the LA Experimental Artists group.

Sandra Mueller is the founding director of BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for women and serves as the Community Arts Advocate for A Window Between Worlds. She received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley in Intellectual History and later studied painting and visual thinking at Mt. St. Mary’s College. She had a prior career in publishing as an editor/writer and produced more than 50 interactive media titles. Her abstract paintings and collages have been shown throughout the Southern California region. She is a regional coordinator for The Feminist Art Project and serves on the national WCA board.

Linda L. Carlson has been a member of SCWCA since 2005. She actively worked on the Gallery Outreach Campaign organized by Ada Brown in conjunction with the Multiple Vantage Points exhibition in 2007. Linda is a Shaman, and is certified in 2nd degree Reiki. She has participated in classroom and self study with the goals of understanding herself and expressing this through her art. She creates artworks using layered symbolic imagery, in fiber collage and assemblage. Her work includes figures, shrines and shields. Linda’s art engages the viewer in a dialogue about her inner spiritual belief that all things are connected.

Cathy Salser is a visual artist who works in collaboration with over 100 battered women’s shelters nationwide to build powerful links between the creative arts and the process of ending domestic violence. With the mentorship and fiscal receivership of the SCWCA in 1992, Cathy founded a nonprofit organization, A Window Between Worlds, that inspires women and children surviving domestic violence to reclaim their own creativity as a part of their healing and empowerment. Cathy’s portraits of survivors have been exhibited in 36 cities nationwide, including the Russell Senate Building in Washington D.C.

Susan Karhroody was born in Tehran, Iran. Her interest in art, especially in human life and nature, was fostered by Persian culture. She attended Tehran University, where she received her bachelor's degree in fine art with a concentration in drawing and painting. In 1997, Karhroody moved to Southern California and continued her studies at California State University, Northridge, where she received her Master's Degree in sculpture. She currently teaches art at the Valley Village School for Disabled Students. As a sculptor and painter, Karhroody mainly creates modern semi-representational pieces. She has been highly influenced by the issues of oppression with which Middle Eastern women have been struggling for years.

Karen Schifman is an art historian who teaches Art History at CSU Northridge. Her research has focused on women artists and the representation of women in visual culture. She is currently the columnist for the “Women Around Town” column for our newsletter and is working on several other writing projects in her field.