I am a community organizer and cultural worker based in Los Angeles with deep roots in racial justice movements and political commitments to poor and working-class people’s land struggles, particularly those activated around the rights of unhoused tenants and homelessness at large as a node of the settler colonial project of the united states. I approach cultural work as a form of complex stewardship that tends to collective life and creates conditions for building community knowledge and shared power.
My practice is grounded in the use of pedagogical processes, dialogue, and artmaking as tools for political-relational development in service of community organizing and collective knowledge-making alongside community members across the spectrum of social locations. I am especially interested in revealing the vertices of struggle between conflicted affinity groups within movement communities in order to expand our collective capacity to build the formidable solidarities needed to create lasting systemic transformation.
I engage directly with institutional and state power through infiltration and experiential research and create objects, images, and texts that illicit the questions necessary for liberatory political development – video, sound, drawing, sculptures, performance, puppets, archives, analysis, poetry – any means necessary. I prioritize the development of spaces that provide the conditions for this form of reflection to occur through organizing exhibitions, direct actions, workshops, autonomous zones, meetings and discussions, liberated defensible territories.
I credit my upbringing in a working-class single parent household, complex trauma and institutionalization, and my earliest experiences within post-9/11 social justice movement spaces in Los Angeles as my first and foundational forms of education. As an older returning student I earned a Bachelor of Fine Art at Art Center College of Design in 2013 and went on to complete a Master of Fine Art at University of California Irvine in 2019. Part of my cultural practice has included many roles as a worker within the non-profit industrial complex where I have been able to acquire a nuanced education on the function of the social service field as an arm of the policing and prison system within the machinations of settler colonialism and test the possibilities for infiltration and sabotage within these systems as a potent form of cultural production. I currently serve as the Manager of Community Programs and Research with the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and organize with several community groups working on the struggle for land and housing in Los Angeles.
Contact
kristy.lovich@gmail.com
Education
2019, Master of Fine Art, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA
2013, Bachelor of Fine Art with Distinction, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA
Program Leadership in Cultural, Academic, and Social Service Fields
2023-Present, Manager of Community Programs and Research, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Los Angeles, CA
2023-Present, Founding Member and Facilitator, After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Los Angeles, CA
2019-2020, Supervisor, Street Based Outreach/Unsheltered Homelessness, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Los Angeles, CA
2015-2020, Co-Founder, Mountain House, Los Angeles, CA
2014-2016, Children’s Program Coordinator, Women’s Support Group Facilitator, Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women & Children, Los Angeles, CA
2009-2010, Co-Founder, Community Program Facilitator, Corazon Del Pueblo, Boyle Heights, CA
2008-2010, Co-Founder, Artistic Director, Studio Cuarenta y Tres: Gallery & Community Project Space, Boyle Heights, CA
Facilitation, Community Organizing, Teaching
2024-Present, Community Organizer, Steering Committee, LASH-OUT [Los Angeles Struggle for Housing-Organizing Unhoused Tenants]
2022-2023, Secondary Special Education Teacher, Resource Program, English Language Arts, School of the Visual Arts and Humanities, Los Angeles, CA
2019, Instructor, Special Topics in Social Practice, University of California, Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, Irvine, CA
2017-2018, Teaching Assistant, Special Topics in Architecture, Sculpture, Digital Video Production, and Painting, University of California Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, Irvine, CA
2005-2018, Group Facilitator/Organizer, AWARE-LA [Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere], Los Angeles, CA
2014-2016, Arts & Creative Writing Instructor, Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women & Children, Los Angeles, CA
2011-2013, Teaching Assistant, Sculpture, Installation, Critical Practice, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA
2010-2014, Art Instructor & Group Facilitator, Cityscapes, Amanecer Community Counseling Center, Los Angeles, CA
2010, Community Organizer, Todos Somos Arizona, Los Angeles, CA
2009, Mural Painting Instructor-Facilitator, Lorena Terrace, Cesar Chavez Community Garden; Wabash Recreation Center, Boyle Heights, CA
2006-2007, Visual Art & Creative Writing Instructor, Hollywood Community Housing Corporation, Los Angeles, CA
Curatorial Projects and Public Programs
2025
Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake, Online Exhibition (Forthcoming)
The After Echo Park Lake Collection: A Community Archive, Skid Row History Museum and Archive, Los Angeles, CA
Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake (Selections), National Public Housing Museum, Chicago, IL
Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake, Archival Exhibition, Skid Row History Museum and Archive, Los Angeles, CA
Liberatory Livingroom: Belongings Precede Belonging, Skid Row History Museum and Archive, Los Angeles, CA
Tenants in the Streets, Panel Discussion, Skid Row History Museum and Archive, Los Angeles, CA
Tenant Power Toolkit: Equity Tenant Convening Part II, UCLA Luskin School of Public Policy, Los Angeles, CA
2024
Tenant Power Toolkit: Equity Tenant Convening Part I, UCLA Luskin School of Public Policy, Los Angeles, CA
Freedom School: Claiming Territory, The Present History of Spatial Militancy, Union de Vecinos, Boyle Heights, CA
Freedom School: Community Archives as Community Defense & The Radical Practice of Remembering, Skid Row History Museum, Los Angeles, CA
2023
Tenant Power Toolkit: Tenant Power Convening, Avenue 50 Studio, Highland Park, CA
2019
For Two Weeks in May, Multi-Modal Installation, University Art Gallery, Irvine, CA
Unsettled: Our Bodies Warm in the Sun, University Art Gallery, Irvine, CA
Unsettled: Our Bodies Warm in the Sun, Site Specific Performance, Monrovia Canyon Park, Monrovia, CA
2018
Hey Baby Jamboree, Mountain House Free Thrift, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA
WE (TBD), CO-WORK-PLAY, Multi-Modal Installation, Human Resources LA, Los Angeles, CA
2014
Meet me in the day room., Cielo Galleries, South Los Angeles, CA
2013
Don’t go runnin off, there’s lotsa shit to carry, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA
2009
Flowers of Fire: Community Performance Forum, Corazon Del Pueblo, Boyle Heights, CA
Epidemic Proportions, Studio Cuarenta y Tres, Boyle Heights, CA
A Boyle Heights Conundrum, Studio Cuarenta y Tres, Boyle Heights, CA
Cocido de Arte, Studio Cuarenta y Tres, Boyle Heights, CA
Speaking Engagements and Workshops
2025
Artists Against Art Washing, Panel Moderator, Skid Row History Museum and Archive, Los Angeles, CA
2024
Liberatory Livingroom: Belongings Precede Belonging, UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, CA
Liberatory Livingroom: Belongings Precede Belonging, Association for Law, Property, & Society Annual Meeting, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA
Presentation of Emancipatory Housing Research: Homeless Service Provision - Stolen Time, Stolen Labor, and the Commodification of Need, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii
2019
Art & Activism, Panel Discussion, Loyola Marymount University, Art Therapy Department, Los Angeles, CA
Art in the Reparative Mode, Panel Discussion, Medical Humanities Department, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA
2017
Home-Place as a Site of Resistance, Women’s Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles, CA
Overcrossings, Panel Discussion, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles, CA
What is your vision: Arts & Racial Justice, Showing Up for Racial Justice Annual Summit, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
2014-2016
Healing Through Art, Workshop Series, Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women and Children, Los Angeles, CA
Women’s Circle, Workshop Series, Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women and Children, Los Angeles, CA
Selected Performances
2016
They were so thirsty they mistook the sky for water., Hahamongna Watershed, Arroyo Seco, Los Angeles, CA
2013
Festival of Words, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, Pacoima, CA
2012
These Are Only Words, Breed Street Shul, Boyle Heights, CA
Talking Piece, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA
(UN)space, Site specific performance series, Union Station, Los Angeles, CA
2011
Boyle Heights Writers Play Westwood, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
2010
Mujeres de Maize: 13 Baktun, Corazon Del Pueblo, Los Angeles, CA
Publications
TENTS AND TENANTS: After Echo Park Lake, 2025, Ananya Roy, Annie Powers, William Sens, Jr., Kristy Lovich
Defend Black Life/Divorce the Cops, 2020, Kristy Lovich
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Newsletter Project, We TBD, 2020, Von Curtis, Olga Koumoundouros, Francesca Lalane, Kristy Lovich, Ofelia Marquez, Jennifer Moon
How to Build a Mountain House, 2019, Kristy Lovich
Overcrossings, pasos elevados, 2017, Erik Benjamins, Jess & Yvette Castillo, Jonathan Crisman, Steven Chodoriwsky, Andrea Huber, Frances Huynh, Ryan S. Jeffery, Flora Kao, Isa Knafo, LABOR, PATAO & Alex Reed, Julie & Kristy Lovich, Heather M. O’Brien, Scott Oshima, Jonathan Takahashi
Mujeres de Maiz: Rites of Passage, 2012, Adilia ‘Negra’ Torres, Amita Swadhin, Andrea Garcia Mauk, Angeles Munoz, Arlene Galindo Jimenez, Aurora Guerrero, Betty Sanchez, Binyamina Aisha Barrios, Christine Xihuitl Vega, Cora Ramirez-Vasquez, Diana Ocampo, Diana Pando, Diea May, D’Lo, Elizabeth Retolaza, Elvia Susana Rubalcava, Erika M. Martinez, Felicia Montes, Iris De Anda, Jacky Acosta, Jenuine Poetess, Jovita A. Guiillen aka “Vica G.”, Kristy Lovich, Lilia Ramirez, Linda Vallejo, Lydia Zulema Martinez, Margaret ‘Quica’ Alarcon, Lynette Najar, Maria Guillen Valdovinos, Marilynn Montano, Marisa Urrutia Gedney, Martha A. Rodriguez, Martha Ninozka Gonzalez, Nancy Aide Gonzalez, Pola Lopez, Patricia Paz Moya, Patricia Zamorano, Pilar Rodriguez Aranda, Rachel Veliz, Ramona Sandoval, Sara Haskie-Mendoza, Susana Ramirez, Sylvia L. Rubalcava-Chavez, Tala Khanmalek, Yreina D. Cervantez, Yvette Rae Hinojosa, Zuleica Zepeda
Media
You Have to Move! The Cruel and Ineffective Criminalization of Unhoused People in Los Angeles, 2024, John Rafling, Human Rights Watch
Inside LA’s Homeless Industrial Complex, 2022, Tracy Rosenthal, The New Republic
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex with Kristy Lovich, 2020, This is Revolution Podcast
Why Armed Cops Are the First Responders for the Homelessness Crisis, 2020, Matt Tinoco, LAist
LA leaders OK controversial cleanups around ‘bridge’ shelters, amid pandemic, 2020, Liz Chou, Los Angeles Daily News
L.A.’s Homeless Agency Faces Calls to Dissolve Ties with Police, 2020, Emily Alpert Reyes and Benjamin Oreskes Los Angeles Times
Yes, We Exist. Artist-Mothers Share Their Stories, 2018, Julie Wolfson, PBS SoCal