Annie Buckley is a multidisciplinary artist and writer with an emphasis on art and social justice and an award-winning educator and leader. She is the founder and director of Prison Arts Collective (PAC), a statewide university-prison partnership in California dedicated to expanding access to the arts and leadership opportunities to people experiencing incarceration. PAC engages students, alumni, and faculty co-facilitate arts programming in 12 state prisons and is based at SDSU with chapters at CSU Fullerton and Cal Poly Humboldt and an interdisciplinary research team with CSUSB and UC Irvine. Buckley has raised over $4 million for PAC since 2013 and is the PI on a statewide research project with PAC looking at the impact of the arts on wellness for people experiencing incarceration. 

 

Buckley’s art embraces image, text, and participatory practice and has been included in museum and gallery exhibitions since the 1990s, including a two-person exhibition at Los Angeles International Airport in 2011; a solo exhibition and multi-day interactive performance at the Hollywood Art and Culture Center in Florida with Miami Basel in 2014, and a community-based event at the Terrain Biennial in 2017. She is the curator of exhibitions including, “Disruption! Art and the Prison Industrial Complex” at Pitzer College, and co-founder and co-editor of the online publication, “Radical Actions: From Teaching Artists to Social Practice.” She is the author and illustrator of Kids Yoga Deck, has published two novels with collaborative art projects, and her writing about contempprary art is widely published, including in Artforum, Art in America, and The Huffington Post. Her series about teaching art in prisons, "Art Inside," is published by Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.

 

Buckley has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including three highly competitive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, several university awards, and recognition in the CA State Senate. In 2023, Buckley was awarded the inaugural Outstanding Scholar Award for Public Impact from the Division of Research and Innovation at San Diego State University, where she is Associate Dean of Faculty Advancement. In 2019, she was named Outstanding Faculty Member, the highest faculty honor at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), where she was Professor of Visual Studies. Buckley has a BA with honors from UC Berkeley; an MFA in New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design; received a bilingual/bicultural (English/Spanish) teaching credential; is a certified yoga instructor; and holds a Certificate of Women’s Executive Leadership from UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business.