bio:

Weston Teruya is an artist and cultural producer who moves between individual and collective modes of practice. In his individual work, he has created projects for the Mills College Art Museum, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Kearny Street Workshop, Longhouse Projects & the NYC Fire Museum, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and public art commissions for the San Francisco and Alameda County Arts Commissions. Weston has received grants from Artadia, Asian Cultural Council, Creative Work Fund, and the Center for Cultural Innovation and has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, A. Farm Saigon, Montalvo Arts Center, Ox-Bow, the deYoung Museum, Recology SF, and Kala Art Institute. For three seasons, he also produced and hosted (un)making, an interview-based podcast through the West Coast online arts writing and criticism publication, Art Practical. Weston occasionally writes about artists’ exhibition projects for organizations including the Recology Artist-in-Residence Program.

Weston is a co-founding member of Related Tactics, a collective of artists of color who create projects at the intersection of race and culture, alongside Michele Carlson and Nate Watson. The collective’s projects have been presented through the Corning Museum of Glass, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Museum of Craft & Design SF, ICA San Jose, USF Thacher Gallery, Southern Exposure, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Museum of Capitalism at the Kellen Gallery of Parsons. The collective’s writing has been published through Brooklyn Rail, The Hopkins Review, and New Glass Review. Their artist publication, Shelf Life, was designed and distributed by Sming Sming Books and can be found in numerous University library collections. They are currently developing a bilingual, photography focused version of Shelf Life with Asuncion Casa Editora in Argentina. Related Tactics has been awarded a Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, Print Public Fellowship from Kala Art Institute, grants from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission, and were commissioned to produce a CoLAB residency project with Montalvo Arts Center.

In his other professional work in the field, Weston has almost 15 years of experience across different roles in grantmaking and arts fund development. He worked for the SF Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program (now Community Investments) and served as an appointed Commissioner with the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, where he chaired the Grants Committee and served on the Policy Committee. He has served on grant selection panels for funders including the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Craft Research Fund, Zellerbach Foundation’s Community Art Panel, and Creative Work Fund; as well as public art panels for SF and Berkeley Arts Commissions. As a grant writer, he supports culturally-rooted arts organizations with a specialty in cultural equity, civic arts, and artist-centered projects. He has successfully secured grant funding for his clients ranging from National Endowment for the Arts – Our Town to Hewlett Foundation 50 Commissions. 

photos by Andria Lo