Biography
Mr. Almanza
Introduction to Art, Drawing, Painting, AP Studio Art: 2D Design, AP Studio Art: Drawing
Mr. Almanza is the Visual Arts teacher at HArts Academy. Almanza was born in Southern California and raised in the South Bay. After graduating from Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, he attended UC Berkeley and earned his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and Education. Soon after graduating from Berkeley, Almanza decided to enter the field of education and attended Cal State Dominguez Hills, earning a secondary teacher’s credential in Mathematics and Fine Arts. His first teaching assignment was at Banning High School in Wilmington, where he taught Math and Fine Arts for 7 years before deciding to pursue his Master of Fine Arts degree at Laguna College of Art Design in 2010. Mr. Almanza has been teaching at HArts Academy of Los Angeles since 2015. In 2017, Almanza was named a “Hero in Education” and honored by LAUSD District 7 Representative Richard Vladovic.
Mr. Almanza’s philosophy on teaching is that a teacher should be a facilitator for discovery and invention. When it comes to teaching art, Almanza thinks this principle is particularly true. Students must be given the freedom to be creative, to take risks and to fail. Upon failure, students must not be discouraged, but instead guided to a new path until success is achieved.
Mr. Almanza believes that you cannot teach a classroom full of students in the same way. Students possess many varied modalities of learning such as visual, auditory, kinesthetic, logical, and social. To accommodate these different styles of learning a good teacher must present information in more than one way, more than once. Students learn by seeing, hearing, doing, reflecting, doing again, and teaching others.
When Mr. Almanza is not in the classroom, he works as a professional artist producing paintings out of his home art studio. Almanza has exhibited his work at numerous galleries and museums across the state of California. Additionally, Mr. Almanza works as a curator for 2 galleries in Long Beach; Gallery 99, and the Metropolitan Design Gallery. His current body of work examines the intersection between politics, culture and identity as crafted through the lens of a Chicano painter working in the pretext of contemporary aesthetics. His work draws inspiration from traditional history and easel painting and artists such as Jacques Louis David, Gustave Courbet, José Guadalupe Posada, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Carlos Almaraz, Vincent Valdez and the band Rage Against the Machine.
