Diego Robles
Lecturer
Art Education
Internship Coordinator
SDSU
Bio
He has now lived most of his life in Southern California, residing in the city of Los Angeles & areas in-and-around Los Angeles County for more than half of it. He has been inspired by independent film, video stores, public libraries, comics, and a lot of live and recorded music. As a young person, he lived a year in Tijuana, Baja California and a year in Mexico City, Mexico, where his interests in Meso-American, Mexican, and Latin-American cultures greatly grew from first-hand experiences with friends, family, and second-hand book stores. He's a Film School graduate of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, as well as an MFA graduate of CalArts's School of Film/Video & the School of Critical Studies.
As a local to the US-Mexico border, he continually re-explores various ways the presence and absence of dualities is exhibited and disciplined into boundaries and cliches. With more than 20 years of Teaching-Artist experience, Diego has led various Art Laboratories, Book Discussions, Visual and Media Art Exhibits, Cinema Curatorial Series, Film Screenings, Poetry or Group Readings, Theatrical Plays, Dance Performances, Workshops, Classes and participated in several research Projects at: CalArts's - Main Gallery, Bijou Theater, School of Critical Studies, the Community Art Program, & the Integrated Media Center; as well as UCLA's James Bridges Theater, the HyperMedia Studio, the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance, the John Wooden Center, Ackerman Union, the Student Union, UCLA Dorms' Fireside Lounge, and the School of Theater; The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences; Self Help Graphics & Art; Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles; the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater; Stanford; Los Angeles Unified School District; San Diego Unified School District; Westside School of Ballet in Santa Monica; The Echo Park Film Center; CSU Northridge's Performing Arts Center - The Soraya; CSU Long Beach; SDSU; CSU San Bernardino; and most recently with - the Santa Fe Art Institute's Family Residency and Main Gallery, 2220 Art & Archives, and the Los Angeles Filmforum.
Diego currently teaches Art Education and the in’s-and-out’s of Art & Design Internships for San Diego State University. He also teaches explorations into Creativity, Imagination, and Consciousness for students across all majors and departments at CSU San Bernardino. At CSU San Bernardino, he also teaches practice & theoretically based courses on: New Genres, Visual Studies, Writing about Art, Art & Community, the Languages of Art, and Chicanx Art.
In addition to his formal studies in Cinema, Media, and Writing, Diego’s current research meditates on the physical and metaphysical mechanisms inherent when we widen our exploration of being human, and expand our ability to think and feel.
His work has been exhibited domestically and abroad, and his teachings encourage experimental, cross-disciplinary, and innovative methodologies to learning art and cinema. He is currently learning to play the piano and gradually integrating the language of music into his prior work in theater and dance. His artistic wanderings now-a-days often include audio-visual designs that speculate on the socio-historical nature of how the literary, performative, visual, and media arts immerse themselves inside culture and reality - through narratives and rituals.
Diego is also currently engaged in parenthood, learning to raise a daughter, and moved by the numerous stages of human development one lives through, and see’s in others. Diego’s current visual and media art work inquiries into the philosophical underpinnings of how we interpret our inner and outer world during different points in our lives, and the impact this has on how our human and non-human relationships evolve/adapt/struggle through our changing economic, environmental, political, and social climate.