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 currently 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 Education Coordinator and Arts Camps 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 Camp 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. 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