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.
DANIELA ZARATE
Program Assistant
Daniela Zárate, Ph.D. is an extraterrestrial, multi-spirit kaleidoscope of a being interested in spurring spiritual and scientific revolutions in our collective human consciousness. Currently, she is a University of California (UC) Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Riverside, conducting research on social supergene evolution. She received her Ph.D. in biology at the UC San Diego, studying honey bee genomics and behavior. Previously she received a Bachelor's in Biology & Chemistry with minors in Neuroscience & Latinx Studies from Williams College. Daniela strongly believes in the importance and value of science communication and education and strives to make science both accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience. Her science communication style is broadly influenced by theater, dance, spoken word, comedy, and telenovelas.
Teaching Artists
TARRAH AROONSAKOOL: bio coming soon.
MORGAN MANDALAY: Along with being an artist, Morgan has worked as an independent curator and is the founder and director of the itinerant exhibition project SPF15 and co-organizer of Fresh Bread Gallery in Chicago, IL. Morgan has had solo exhibitions throughout the U.S., most recently at Klowden Mann (Los Angeles, CA), Extase (Chicago, IL), Cat Box Contemporary (Queens, NY), BWSMX (Mexico City, MEX) and Et Al Gallery (San Francisco, CA). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Flag Foundation (New York, NY), H.G. Inn (Chicago, IL), Bahamas Biennale (Detroit, MI), DAMA (Turin, ITA), Kimberly Klark (Queens, NY), 0-0 (Los Angeles, CA), David B. Smith Gallery (Denver, CO), Galleria Acapella (Naples, ITA), Left Field (San Luis Obispo, CA), LVL3 (Chicago, IL), and Yautepec (Mexico City, MEX).
Currently, Morgan works in communications at Arts of Life, a progressive studio supporting the creative practices of 60 artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Chicago, IL. In 2017 he completed his MFA at University of California San Diego, where he worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Visual Arts Department and Culture, Art and Technology Writing Program. Morgan also holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2018 Fellow of Shandaken Project's Paint School in New York, NY. His work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Autre Magazine, Artillery Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Times.
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.
