Los Angeles Poverty Department Board of Directors

Catherine Gudis

Member since 2011 (President), Historian

Catherine Gudis is Director of the M.A./Ph.D. program in Public History at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Gudis is the author of Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Cultural Landscape. Her next book, tentatively entitled Curating the City: The Framing of Los Angeles, explores the ways in which public art, performance, and history can help frame and socially activate urban space and place in Southern California. In 2011-2012, she will serve as a Getty Scholar, conducting research towards this project.

Ronnie Walker

Member since 2024

I was first introduced to LA Poverty Department by my best friend Kevin Michael in 2007 after being released from Tehachapi prison. We both were products of Skid Row, and I desperately needed to change my life. LAPD provided that needed outlet. I have performed in several projects and I’m happy to count LAPD as my extended family.
Ronnie is and Amity Alumni, where he works as a JIR ADVOCATE. I work for Amity foundation where I advocate for people marginalized by addiction, trauma, criminality, and incarceration, poverty, racism, and sexism, homelessness, and violence. I’ve been doing this work for 16 years. And I’m also bringing performances to those housed in Amity facilities.

John Malpede

Member since 1988, Director, Los Angeles Poverty Department

For 30 years, John Malpede has been a visible figure in the national performance art and experimental theater world. In 1985 he founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department and serves as its director. From 1985-89, he also worked as a welfare advocate for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Aram Moshayedi

Member since 2020, (Vice President), Curator

Aram Moshayedi is a writer and the Robert Soros curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he most recently co-organized (with Connie Butler) the exhibition and publication Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019. Other exhibitions include Stories of Almost Everyone; Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only (with Hamza Walker); and All the Instruments Agree: An Exhibition or a Concert. Since joining the Hammer in 2013, he has curated projects by artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marwa Arsanios, Andrea Bowers, Andrea Büttner, Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Shadi Habib Allah, Maria Hassabi, Jasmina Metwaly, Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami, and Avery Singer. He was formerly associate curator at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), where he organized exhibitions and oversaw the production of new works. He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues as well as Artforum, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, Metropolis M, Parkett, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and Bidoun, for which he is a contributing editor. Moshayedi served as a Center panelist for Performance in 2020.

Kimberly Welch

Member since 2024, black feminist scholar and J.D. Candidate at UCLA School of Law

She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA's doctoral program in Theater and Performance Studies in June 2018. With an emphasis on the African diaspora, her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century performances and diverse iterations of homelessness
and incarceration, questioning the ways in which the law and constructions of gender, sexuality, and race mediate how people navigate said sites of spatial dispossession. Welch’s work has been featured in several journals including American Literature, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and Cultural Dynamics.
Before law school, Welch was an assistant professor of English and a Gender Studies affiliate faculty member at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). Prior to UMSL, Welch was a visiting assistant professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Outside of teaching, Welch volunteers with the El Centro Skid Row Legal Clinic. She also has worked closely with the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2014. From 2016 to 2018, she served as a Humanities Advisor for their “Public Safety For Real” project, which was funded by the California Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, Welch worked with the theater company on their Walk the Talk Archival Project. She is excited to join the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Board.

Zelenne Cárdenas

Member since 2013, (Treasurer), Community Advocate

Zelenne L. Cárdenas is Director of Prevention Services for Social Model Recovery Systems, Inc., a human services organization in Skid Row, Los Angeles. In this position, Zelenne’s developed resources and strategies to address the root causes of violence specifically related to problems of drugs and alcohol. Zelenne has mobilized community residents to challenge the status quo and to demand a healthier, safer environment in Skid Row”. In 2001, she was selected to receive The California Wellness Foundation’s Community Leader Fellowship to support her violence prevention projects and in 2004, Zelenne was named Local Hero of the Year by KCET and Union Bank of California during Hispanic Heritage Month. She is a board member of Housing California.

Julia Carnahan

Member since 2009 (Secretary), Arts Producer

Julia worked as a line producer and program coordinator for the Los Angeles Festival, and as Associate Producer / Music Producer for the International Festival of Art & Ideas in New Haven, CT. She has worked as a consultant to The Durfee Foundation, Guggenheim Museum, Mass MOCA and the World Festival of Sacred Music. She has been company manager for a dozen productions of Peter Sellars.