episode 256 | Shanna Strauss

We are delighted to kick off our eighth season of the Hello, Print Friend podcast!

This week Miranda speaks with Shanna Strauss, a Tanzanian American mixed media artist and printmaker based in Oakland, California, and a faculty member at California College of the Arts. They talk about the winding road that led her back to art and how printmaking became not just a medium, but a community, a lineage, and a way of carrying history forward. 

They get into Strauss' early inspiration from Charlotte O’Neal’s studio in Tanzania, what she learned from organizing and social justice work in Quebec, and how mentorship connects her to a larger printmaking family tree, all the way back through traditions of resistance print. As well as Beekeeping. Ancestors. And a new body of work Shauna’s beginning around Tanzanian kanga cloth.