Who We Are
Signal Fire is currently working through a re-visioning process with an interim Board of Directors and staff team. Our Board Members are former participants and guides, and arts and culture workers, who bring with them years of experience in decolonizing organizations, nonprofit arts administration, strategic planning, and a deep knowledge of Signal Fire’s signature vision.
Interim Board of Directors
M Acuff
M Acuff’s practice ranges from object making to installation to video and performance, and makes legible the specific agents that have made, erased and perpetuated specific kinds of knowledge, structure and perception over other possible formations. Acuff’s work re-fashions dominant ideas about nature, gender, race and class that organize and enact omnicidal, world-ending violence, venturing instead to seed alternative, biophilic imagination and radicality. Acuff is a Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.
Felipe Delfino
Felipe Delfino served on Signal Fire’s interim board from April through September, 2022. Felipe brought expertise as a Signal Fire alumni and guide to our visioning process. Felipe is an artist, educator and human person living in ancestral Abenaki land in the green mountains. His interests lie in the intersection between experience and knowledge, in the search of an embodied practice that promotes awareness and healing for both people and land.
Joan Handwerg
Joan Handwerg is an educator, artist, and proud Signal Fire alumna who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She studied art and modern art history and visual culture at the University of British Columbia, Tufts University, the University of Glasgow, and Colby College. A founding faculty member of the Critical Theory and Creative Research MA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, , Handwerg designed and taught thesis and art history curricula for many years and organized fellow faculty members for the American Association of University Professors. She was awarded a Rockefeller Research Grant for her studies on the intersections between fascism, surrealism and psychoanalysis in the 1930s work of Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Anna Ialeggio
Anna Ialeggio (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and performer, currently living on Cayuga homelands in Ithaca, NY and serving as an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Wells College. Anna has been a part of Signal Fire as a trip participant, guide, and board member since 2015.
Olga Koumoundouros
Olga Koumoundouros served on Signal Fire’s interim board from April through September of 2022 supporting strategic plan development through a trauma informed lens. Olga is a Los Angeles artist, educator, and researcher dedicated to social justice by creating works that map interconnecting ideas of systemic economic, gender, and racial inequities and how they affect American culture. Through sculpture, drawings, writings, and socially engaged and civic art, she works with communities and survivors of violence to lift up creative power that strengthens peaceful daily living for all people in public contexts and spaces. She is currently a creative strategist at Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health’s Office of Violence Prevention and is gaining more tools as a Ph.D. student in Social Work at the University of Southern California.
Daniela Naomi Molnar
Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist, poet, and writer working with the mediums of language, image, paint, pigment, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. She can be found in Portland, Oregon, exploring public wildlands, or at www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar
Susan Murrell
Susan Murrell is an artist whose work investigates an expanding concept of landscape as our perspective continues to shift amid the climate crisis. She is a member of Carnation Contemporary and professor of art at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, where she explores this spectacular corner of the state with her dog, Amiga.
Elizabeth Quinn
Elizabeth Quinn is an artist and co-director of Fieldworks Consulting. Since April 2018, Fieldworks Consulting has helped launch residency programs around the country as well as guide non profits through strategic planning and periods of organizational assesment. From March 2020 to August of 2021, Quinn was the Interim Executive Director of PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon. In past roles, Quinn has also acted as the Programs Director at Caldera in Oregon, the Founding Editor of High Desert Journal, and the Executive Director of The Dalles Art Association.
Interim Staff
Renée Rhodes
Renée Rhodes (she/her) is an artist, gardener, and cultural worker living 2 miles from the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco, California. She has supported and shaped creative programming for San Francisco Art Institute, Greenhorns, Root Division, and South Seattle Community College; while also engaging in land-based work and environmental justice education at ecological restoration sites, urban parks, and community farms. She is passionate about the intersection of art-making and ecological thinking.