Annie Buckley is a multidisciplinary artist and writer with an emphasis on art and social justice and an award-winning professor and nonprofit project leader. She applies her many years of experience in program development to mentor others through one-on-one coaching and small group trainings.

 

In 2013, Buckley launched what soon grew into Prison Arts Collective, which brought the transformative power of the arts and teacher training to over 10,000 people incarcerated in 17 California state prisons. Buckley is currently the founding director of the Institute for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Justice at San Diego State University, where she is also a Professor of Visual Studies and the Principal Investigator and lead of VISTA (Valuing Incarcerated Scholars through Academia).

Buckley has received awards and grants, including five competitive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a grant from the Mellon Foundation, and numerous grants and contracts from the California Arts Council and California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In 2019, Buckley received formal recognition in the California State Senate by Senator Jim Beall for PAC, the inaugural Community Engaged Scholar award at CSU San Bernardino, and was named Outstanding Faculty, the top faculty honor. In 2023, Buckley was awarded the inaugural Public Impact Award from the Division of Research and Innovation and San Diego State University.

Buckley is the author of over 250 reviews and essays on contemporary art published in leading magazines including Artforum.com, Art in America, KCET ArtBound, The Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the author of two books of fiction within multidisciplinary art projects, the author and illustrator of Kids Yoga Deck (Chronicle Books, 2003), and author of numerous non-fiction books for youth. Most recently, Buckley is the editor of Higher Education and the Carceral State (Routledge, 2024) and author of Changemakers' Guide to Prison Arts Programming (Routledge, 2026). 

Buckley’s creative embraces writing, curation, collage, and participatory collaborative practice. Her work has been included in museum and gallery exhibitions since the 90s. Highlights include an exhibition and participatory performance of "The People's Tarot," at Hollywood Art and Culture Center as part of the international art fair, Miami Basel, in 2014 and a large two-person exhibition at the Los Angeles International Airport in 2010-11.

Buckley has a BA in Art with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, an MFA in New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design; and a certificate in Women's Executive Leadership from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

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