About Us
The Poet StoryLab: Narrative, Community,
and the Transformative Possibilities of Brown Storytelling
Taking our name from our campus mascot, “The Poet”, the StoryLab is a three-year campus and community humanities initiative at Whittier College that generates and amplifies stories that celebrate the complexity, friction, and expansiveness of a “brown” identity in the U.S., paying close attention to the way intersectional experiences related to gender and sexual orientation impact the lived experience of individuals in our current cultural and political climate. We are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Our funding areas include support for community outreach; curriculum development; student internships; experiential learning including visiting speakers and field trips; faculty research; visiting artists and writers; a post-doctoral teaching fellowship; and campus mural restoration.
At its heart, the StoryLab facilitates the production of individual and collaborative narrative projects created by faculty, students, visiting artists and writers, and community members. The narrative projects take many different forms: oral histories, podcasts, museum critique, photographic interventions, AI visualizations, personal essays, recipes, and historical reimaginings, to name a few; all are centered around personal narrative and the celebration of brownness.
Project Committee
JOHN BAK
Project Committee
SONIA CHAIDEZ
Project Committee
LISA NEWTON
Project Committee
José OROZCO
our team
Danny Jauregui’s art consists of animations, digital photographs, and game-engine projects that explore the history of LA’s queer spaces, incorporate historical records found in archives, and link issues of belonging, contested public spaces, and public memory. Among other locations, his work has been exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), Estacion Tijuana, LACMA, The Museo Ruffino Tamayo, The Power Plant in Toronto, and in collections including The Addison Gallery of American Art. In 2022 Jauregui received the City of Los Angeles Artists fellowship (COLA). He teaches courses in drawing, game art, and digital photography.
Kate Palmer Albers teaches classes at Whittier College on the history and theory of photography, visual culture, new media, and contemporary art. Her most recent book, The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph (UC Press, 2021), focuses on the role of ephemerality throughout the history of photography. The concept of ephemerality encompasses artists’ projects that engage with popular modes of contemporary media technology within a deeply networked culture (GPS, Twitter, virtual reality, GIFs, data storage, the community-based and democratic promises of Wikipedia, etc.) and extends back through to the earliest days of the medium.
In Fall 2023, Dr. Lopez Rivas joined Whittier’s Art & Visual Studies Department. Specializing in Latinx and Latin American art, Philomena Lopez Rivas is working on Beyond Obscurity and Legibility: Chaz’s Deconstruction of American Art, the first book-length analysis of Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez’s practice as canonical to American art history. She earned her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego (2023). She is a recipient of a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art (2021) and held a San Diego Diversity Fellowship from 2015-2019. Lopez Rivas also has interests in working-class aesthetics and popular culture. Her current research project explores the relationship between indigenous geographies, public space, and imagined landmarks (such as sculptures and sites of remembrance).