Biographical Information

Annie Buckley is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator with an emphasis on art and social justice and the founder and director of the Prison Arts Collective, a statewide program dedicated to expanding access to the transformative power of the arts to incarcerated people. Professor Buckley joined San Diego State University as Director of the School of Art + Design in summer 2019 and is thrilled to collaborate with faculty, students, and staff in the School. She joins SDSU from CSU San Bernardino, where she began in 2011 as Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and ultimately gained tenure and then promotion to full professor. Prior to joining CSUSB, Professor Buckley taught in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Teacher Education Program.

Professor Buckley’s research and creative practice is focused on socially-engaged art, community partnerships, and critical and curatorial projects. She began the Prison Arts Collective (PAC) in 2013 and has been awarded over $2 million in prestigious grants and contracts from the California Arts Council, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and the National Endowment the Arts for the project. She is the author of over 250 reviews and essays on contemporary art published in Artforum, Art in America, The Huffington Post, and others and she is a contributing editor to Los Angeles Review of Books, where she writes the column “Art Inside” about facilitating art in prisons. She has presented her art and community activism work at national and international conferences including in Ireland and Belgium and her creative practice embraces image, text, and participatory practice.

Buckley has received numerous awards for her work including, together with PAC colleagues and a community partner, a formal recognition on the floor of the California State Senate by Senator Jim Beall. At CSUSB, she received two inaugural awards, the Innovative Teaching Award and the Community Engaged Scholar award, and, in 2019, was awarded the top faculty honor of Outstanding Professor and named the John M. Pfau Endowed Professor.

Buckley received a BA with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles. In addition, she is a member of the national honor society Phi Kappa Phi; has held a bilingual/bicultural (English/Spanish) California State Teaching Credential; is a certified yoga teacher; and, in 2019, completed the Women’s Executive Leadership Program in the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley.

Related sites:
Prison Arts Collective
Art Inside – Annie Buckley’s series on Arts-in-Corrections