In teaching academic writing and ESL for the past twenty years, I have focused the content of my courses on culture, media, democracy, philosophy, and food. In other words, I like reading and thinking about the freedom to grow, cook, and eat foods in a variety of cultures and examining how our choices are affected by the ever present and overpowering media.

My work draws from a wide range of historical and contemporary experiences. I create architecture for the remainder by questioning one’s perceptions on how the world is viewed. It is a laboratory for creative dialogue that transcends personal particulars and is transformational.

Laura Fantone, PhD, is a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Beatrice Bain Interdisciplinary Research Group. She recently completed two book projects and documentaries in Italy connecting oral history, video, and photo exhibits on gender, globalization, contested historical memory, and political participation. Her recent projects engaged with xenophobia in Italy and displacement of Roma (Gypsies).

Sarah Ewick is the Director of Academic Administration at SFAI, and teaches the Internship course within the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. She has worked in art museums, galleries, and in higher education, including the Harvard University Art Museums, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, the Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton, MA), and the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery. She is the recent recipient of a 2011 grant from the Creative Capacity Fund’s NextGen Arts Program.

Research Interests: Literary cultural studies: Francophone Caribbean and Maghrebin literature and film, race, ethnicity and gender in literature, the history of Islam in Europe from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period, French medieval poetry, postcolonial and feminist theory.

Grants and Honors: French Government Scholarship; UC Berkeley and Columbia University grants for research in Paris, Rome and London; named a "Knight Fellows 2007 Favorite Professor" at Stanford University.

Bijan Yashar was born in Tehran, Iran and has lived in California since 1979. Bijan’s photography and video works reflect a variety of subject matter and content: the social, the phenomenological, the political, the aesthetic, and things he says he has no words for, only images. In addition to pursuing his fine art work, Bijan is a freelance video editor and a digital media consultant.