PATH Cultivating the Arts and Humanities Success Summit
On Friday, Nov. 7, 2025 at San Diego Miramar College, colleagues from UC San Diego and the San Diego Community College District will gathered for the second Success Summit, part of their joint PATH program supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Keynote speaker was Philadelphia-based artist and social activist Roberto Lugo, who provided a pottery demo and artist talk: "Hip Hop Meets Ceramics: Power, Pedagogy, and Art."
Registration was open to all faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students.
Nov. 7, 2025 - Agenda
- 8:30 a.m. – Registration and breakfast
- 9 a.m. – Welcome
- 9:15 a.m. – Keynote with Q&A: "Hip Hop Meets Ceramics: Power, Pedagogy, and Art"
- Guest speaker: Roberto Lugo
- 10:15 a.m. – Break
- 10:30 a.m. – Demonstration by Roberto Lugo
- 12 p.m. – Remarks, lunch and community
About Roberto Lugo
Roberto Lugo is a Philadelphia-based artist, ceramicist, social activist, poet, and educator. Lugo utilizes classical pottery forms in conjunction with portraiture and surface design reminiscent of his North Philadelphia upbringing and Hip Hop culture to highlight themes of poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Lugo’s works utilize traditional European and Asian ceramic techniques reimagined with a 21st-century street sensibility. Their hand-painted surfaces feature classic decorative patterns and motifs combined with elements of modern urban graffiti and portraits of individuals whose faces are historically absent on this type of luxury item - people like Sojourner Truth, Dr. Cornel West, and The Notorious BIG, as well as Lugo’s family members and, very often, himself.
Lugo holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Penn State. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2023 Heinz Award, a Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures award, a 2019 Pew Fellowship, a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize, and a US Artist Award. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and more.
Read more about Roberto Lugo >>
Prior Success Summits
May 2025 Success Summit
On Friday, May 2, 2025 at the UC San Diego Price Center Ballroom, colleagues from UC San Diego and the San Diego Community College District gathered for three important sessions, including a keynote address by Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade of San Francisco State University. Sessions included integrating social justice into your classroom and navigating artificial intelligence in your disciplines.
The day ended with a public panel geared toward students seeking careers in higher education, led by UC San Diego PATH program director Danny Widener and featuring SDCCD faculty Kelly Mayhew, Carmen Carrasquillo and Pegah Motaleb.
Agenda
- 8:30 a.m. — Breakfast and registration
- 9 a.m. — Welcome and opening keynote
- Guest speaker: Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade
- 10:30 a.m. — Session I led by Rodrigo Gomez, SDCCD
- Ai in the Classroom: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into Arts and Humanities
- 11:20 a.m. — Session II led by Kathryn Walkiewicz, UC San Diego
- Interactive Workshop on Social Justice Integration
- 12 p.m. — Networking lunch, with closing remarks
- 1 p.m. — Faculty panel: “A Pathway to Inclusive Teaching: Integrating Social Justice into Higher Education," moderated by Danny Widener, UC San Diego
- The 1 p.m. panel was open to the public.
About the guest speaker
If there is one thing that Jeff Duncan-Andrade knows for sure, it’s this: If you find something that’s not working, change it. And that’s exactly what he has done. The longtime urban educator, researcher and activist felt that students in his community in East Oakland, California, who are mostly Black and Latinx, weren’t getting the education they deserved.
So Duncan-Andrade, a teacher and professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University, co-founded a new school — the Roses in Concrete Community School. It’s a school that centers the wellness of its students above everything else — responding to the unique needs of the community as the pathway to social and academic rigor.
Duncan-Andrade also co-founded the Community Responsive Education Group and the Teaching Excellence Network (TEN) to support schools and districts to build and support similar practices in their communities. Read more about Dr. Duncan-Andrade >>