TEACHING ADULTS: Brenda Berg is a Boulder Creek, California-based visual artist and teacher. Berg’s art making process involves manipulating paint, surface, and sometimes the viewer through modes of covert surveillance. Berg’s recent honors and awards include the 2008 Carol Anika Mihalik Memorial Fund Grant for new media, 2006-07 Santa Cruz County Community Foundation’s Rydell Fellowship nominee, and her work is in collections throughout the United States. Berg graduated Magna cum Laude from San Jose State University’s Art and Design Department and completed her postgraduate work in Studio Art at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In addition to teaching visual arts to youth and adults at the Art Center, Brenda taught art at UCSC for over twenty years.
TEACHING YOUTH: When Brenda’s children were young, she studied early childhood education with several creatively gifted teachers while organizing a parent co-op in Mission Hills, California—which is still in operation today. Thoroughly enjoying working with children, Brenda accepted a teacher/director position at a Montessori School after a move to the Bay Area. She later became the owner and director of her own schools in Santa Clara County. In 1989, Brenda moved to the mountains and returned to making art full time; she also joined forces with the Valley Arts people, who are now the Santa Cruz Mountains Art Center. Still amazed by young people and their creative spirit, Brenda is always delighted to return to the Art Center’s youth classroom where, according to one of our young students, “you get to spread your imagination!”
