Culture Keeper Bio
Shanna Strauss
Shanna Strauss is a queer Tanzanian-American mixed media artist and printmaker based in Oakland, CA (Ohlone unceded territory). Raised in Tanzania and later living in Canada and the U.S., her transnational experiences deeply shape her art, which explores oral traditions, ancestral memory, spirituality, and African diasporic legacies—especially honoring the women in her family. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the de Young Museum and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and featured in Canadian Art, The Washington Post, and San Francisco Standard. She’s received awards such as the Prix Powerhouse and Kala Printmaking Fellowship. Alongside her life partner Jessica Sabogal, she co-founded Taller SANAA, a collaborative studio blending Swahili and Spanish meanings of “art” and “healing,” creating public art and mixed media installations that investigate how we mend individual, collective, and societal wounds, caused by grief, family dynamics, invisible labor, and migration.
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Jess Sabogal
Jess Sabogal is a cuir Colombian-American muralistx, printmaker, and social practice artist from San Francisco, CA. whose large-scale public artworks express a vision of liberation unbounded by man-made borders, white supremacy, and misogyny. They create images that uplift the sacredness of women, people of color, the differently abled, queer and trans folks, immigrants and the undocumented, and our indigenous siblings. Their murals have been commissioned by Facebook, Google, 20th Century Fox, and University of Southern California, University of Arizona among many others. Inspired by the intersection of art, healing and resistance, they co-founded Taller SANAA with life partner and artist Shanna Straus. Together, their collaborative studio investigates how we mend individual, collective, and societal wounds, caused by grief, family dynamics, invisible labor, and migration. Their work has been collected and exhibited by the National Portrait Gallery, LACMA, Library of Congress, Galería de la Raza and others. They are currently an MFA scholar in Art Practice at Stanford University.
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