California College of the Arts Design

Projects 2023

Colores del Rio

Outstanding Social Critique WINNER

Melissa Ortiz

Colores del Rio is a tool that uses local agricultural waste to promote citizen science and community engagement. The tool uses unused red cabbage to allow nonscientists, especially youth, to test pH levels of water for contamination.

Instructors 2023

Monica Martinez is a native of Mexico City, receiving her MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. Monica is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony as well as Sculpture Space in New York, and has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, most recently at the New Positions program at Art Cologne in Germany and the Museo de Arte Querétaro in México. Her work has been featured on Nova, PBS, The Wall Street Journal, PRI’s The World and the United Nations FAO report on Food Security. Monica resides in San Francisco, California where she is an adjunct professor at the Califonia College of the Arts and an active advocate for creating sustainable food systems.

Lauryn Menard is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of PROWL. Her professional background has spanned the worlds of furniture, footwear, future forecasting, and material innovation in a global arena. She has worked with brands of all sizes such as Adobe, Nike, Apple, Google, Specialized Bikes, Concreteworks, Coalesse, MASH, Facebook, and others. Lauryn is also a professor of BioDesign in the MFA Design program at CCA and is currently the Co-Chair of IDSA's Women in Design group in San Francisco.