Staff



Cyndi Finkle

 Photojournalist and  businesswoman Cyndi FInkle is now applying her creative attention and business acumen to the growing of Art Works Studio & Classroom after spending the last 12 years building a successful craft services company called Sunday Night Dinner (www.sndcrafty.com) .
In the past year,  she has expanded ART WORKS to a second location, added new classes and workshops and is creating a product line for the business. Her vision is to offer amazing fine art classes, create an art community, and to empower the students and show them that art is worthwhile and important. 
Her vintage black and white photographs are currently on exhibit at California Roll & Sushi restaurant on Larchmont Blvd in Hollywood. She is also writing a book called Practical and Meaningful  - you can read her blog of the same name at http://practicalandmeaningful.typepad.com
 

Julio Panisello

Julio graduated with a degree in painting and a post graduate degree in pedagogy from the Faculty of FIne Arts at the University of Barcelona. Julio is an active member of the Society of Fine Art Doctors, Graduates, and Art Teachers of Catalunya. He started his teaching career as an art teacher in Spain. He moved to California in 1998 and taught K-12 for many years.  Art and teaching are his true passions in life. In the classroom, his main goal is to provide students with tools to become better artists, but he also works hard to unveil connections between them and the art world so they can awaken and widen their artistic awareness.
He continues to deepen and expand his personal body of work while still being actively involved in the local art community. He is thrilled to bring together his teaching experience and artistic background to Art Works students.
 
 

Tommi Zabrecky

 Tommi Zabrecky's career is characterized by the variety of her accomplishments in the arts. At Art Works, she oversees the Hollywood and Culver City locations to ensure excellent relationships between instructors and students while encouraging creativity through friendly and open communication. She assists the staff by providing an ideal environment for students to create quality work within their technical abilities. Her past experience includes a 5 year tenure at the LA premier independent record label, Epitaph Records, as well as efforts as a fashion stylist where she was featured in film and print and can be found in the recently published Knitting It Old School (Wiley, 2010). For the past fifteen yeas, her personal work extends to a myriad of creative collaboration on various projects with her husband, actor and magician Rob Zabrecky.

Mel Cain

 Mel Cain grew up on the beaches of Australia and attended Sydney College for the Arts before working for almost twenty years in book publishing. She studied printmaking, painting and drawing and her current work focuses on the diversity of the emotional landscape. Mel recently moved from Sydney to Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Amanda Prather

 Amanda was born and raised in Los Angeles. She received her Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Painting from Otis College of Art and Design while working toward a teaching credential. Throughout college, she worked as a summer art teacher at a private school and developed a love for teaching, fine art, and working with children. ART WORKS is so creatively motivating and she hopes to inspires students in the same way they have inspired her.

Chris Northop

 Chris Northrop was born in Brooklyn, New York. As a kid he was exposed to tons of National Geographic magazines, comic books, and movies, which started him down the road to being an artist. He attended Kean University and UCLA. He moved to California in 2007 to pursue his passion for cartoons and animation (and nice weather). Specifically, a passion for color and mood and using that to tell stories. In 2008 Chris started having success as a freelance comic book painter, enough to make it a regular job. He is equally comfortable with a brush or a drawing tablet. Chris also does background paintings for studios in Burbank including Warner Brothers, and has worked for the Nicktoons Network.

The only thing equally as important to Chris as painting and cartoons ins teaching those skills to students and watching them find their voice in their artwork.

Samitra Borhanpour
Justine Serebrin

 Justine was born in Manhattan Beach and now lives and works in Downtown Los Angeles. Inspired by a creative childhood filled with good music, fancy food, and interpretive dancing on tropical beaches, Justine has a rich memory bank on which to draw artistic reference. Justine's latest work deals with passions or the lack there of, childhood, and the Earths' origin. Using natural and found materials she creates work which will be experienced in many unsuspecting ways.
She graduated from Otis College of Art and Design as well as completed the Professional Cinema  Make-up program which has led her into the world of body painting and make-up artistry. At ART WORKS, she is constantly amazed by her students' work, she thrives on sharing her creative knowledge with others. Justine is a core member of The Upper Six Hundreds, an artist collective whose mission is to create and transform spaces into alternative, pop-up galleries while altering and enhancing the stale conventions of the art viewing experience.

Alejandra Biolatto

 Alejandra earner a Liberal studies degree with a concentration in Fine Arts from Cal State Northridge. She is a teacher at Walgrove Elementary(where she teaches first graders) and also conducts Art Education for the staff. Her past experience includes time as Director of Youth Art programming for the Creative Art Center in Burbank. She encourages students to find inspiration in the patterns, lines, and textures in the world around them.

Kris Cahill

 Kris Cahill, meditation teacher, psychic reader and healer, graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 1982. Since then, Kris has worked and created as a fashion designer, set decorator for film, stylist, costume designer for dance and theatre, and most recently, an abstract painter. Moving to Los Angeles in 2006 with her husband, filmmaker and actor Noel Olken, Kris began working as a full time teacher, psychic, and healer in LA. She is awestruck by the power she sees in each human being's ability to choose, change, grow and heal. Kris teaches Psychic Meditation and Energy Healing classes at Art Works and in other locations around Los Angeles. Visit her website for more information about her classes and readings: KrisCahill.com.