“I like to make art that’s fun: fun for me, and fun for the folks enjoying it. “
Miquela Davis
received her AA in Film Photography in 2014. She began her teaching artist career in 2014, teaching after school arts programs for elementary aged students throughout Orange and Los Angeles counties. Her methodology for teaching is simple: valuing accessibility of arts for everyone in a supportive environment where creativity and individuality can thrive. She works with multiple mediums in her personal art practice: zines, comics, illustration, clay, photography, and printmaking to name a few. She enjoys experimenting with new zine making techniques, found objects, recycled materials, and storytelling methods. She organizes OC Zine Fest and zine fests at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock in Los Angeles, where she is also the Arts Education Director.
Miquela Davis is a Native Southern Californian, descended from the Acjachemen, who are indigenous to the Orange County and San Diego area. Miquela happily lives and works out of Orange County, feeling deep familial roots to the area through her ancestral background, as well as more recent ties. Wallace R. Davis was her grandfather, a lawyer involved in supporting civil rights for Hispanic and Latin American youth, as well as the Acjachemen tribe. He has an elementary school named after him in Santa Ana. Due to these imbedded connections to the area, Miquela’s goal is to provide art and arts education to her local community through curating art shows, co-organizing the OC Zine Fest, and volunteering for Santa Ana’s Only Arthouse Non-profit theater, the Frida Cinema.
Bringing new meaning to OC Native…
Miquela has been an arts educator since 2014. She currently works as the Arts Education Director at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock in Los Angeles, CA. She develops curriculum that focuses on developing fine arts skills while incorporating important socio-emotional facets to the learning experience. She creates engaging workshops for both youth and adults, having taught workshops at not only CFAER but Rio Hondo College, and Cal State Fullerton. Her main focus in her adult workshops is zine making, character design, and storytelling. For youth programming, Miquela has been a teaching artist in afterschool arts since 2014, and has become the Arts Education Director for Center for the Arts Eagle Rock since 2022. In this role, she has worked alongside contemporary teaching artists to develop and teach fun and skill building curricula for several weeks of art based activities for ages 6-12 for both afterschool programs and arts camps. She manages the camp team and oversees both the Summer and Winter Arts Camps throughout the year.
In the Spring of 2022, Miquela became a visiting artist in New Cuyama, CA for a project titled “Vecino a Vecino”. This CDC and Blue Sky Center funded project was created with the intention to bring a visiting zine artist to the rural community within Santa Barbara County to teach and engage with the community through art making in the wake of a particularly difficult wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. With a goal of bringing community together and hopefully boost vaccine confidence, as well as provide an artistic outlet for emotional stress from the pandemic, Miquela taught several zine making workshops to the community’s youth. She created zine workshops for the elementary, middle, and high schools. Once the workshops were completed, students’ work was then compiled into a community zine that was distributed to every member of the community. This project was completed in tandem with a town play, Superbloom, organized by the group PlaceBase Productions. To read more about this unique project experience, please visit the Portfolio page.
Teaching Background