Our founder

Brenda Perez is a Mexican, Anahuacan woman born and raised in Highland Park, Northeast Los Angeles. She graduated from California State University, Northridge with a Bachelor's degree in both Chicano Studies and Sociology. Brenda is a graduate of Pepperdine University with a Masters in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy. As a research assistant for Pepperdine University's Culture and Trauma Research Lab, she conducted research on the cultural context of interpersonal/complex trauma recovery and investigated self-esteem improvement strategies for Mexican and Central American adolescent youth. Brenda is a Ph.D Candidate in Depth Psychology focusing on Community psychology, Liberation psychology, Indigenous psychology and Ecopsychology at at Pacifica Graduate Institute. 

Brenda investigates gentrification as a form of internal colonialism in the historic Mexican neighborhood of Highland Park, which currently feeds L.A.’s homelessness crisis. In many urban areas of Los Angeles, murals and community art continues to offer images of Indigenous survivance. In recent years, our neighborhoods beloved and legally registered murals are being systematically erased as part of gentrification efforts. My research looks at Highland Park as a case study with the mass whitewashing of murals, most recently the Cesar Chavez Foundation funded farmworkers mural at Garvanza Elementary during National Hispanic Heritage month and other threatened murals featuring sacred imagery, deep Indigenous iconography, and displaced artistic heritage. Brenda shows how whitewashing Indigenous iconography in community art and constructing fenced walls or “gentrifences'' around gentrifier homes exemplify the disavowal of the neoliberal psyche which Lynne Layton (2009) identified as the main defense mechanism of neoliberal subjectivity. Gentrification is a form of cultural homogenization that measurably increases disparities in community health. Furthermore, this critical participant artivist research shows how the psychological shock of gentrification is an ecopsychological injustice that severs ties between people and the land, thus violating one’s well-being. In Indigenous paradigms, psychological sense of community often includes relationships with place, plants, animals, and spirits. For communities facing de-indigenization and displacement, art-making is a means for cultural survival, not just therapy. Making, memorializing, and maintaining murals and graffiti art can open portals for decoloniality, decolonial praxis, and aid in healing collective and inter-generational traumas. 

Brenda has lectured, published and presented her research in community centers and educational institutions around the United States. Brenda continues her work and research as an art and psyche education consultant using her very own unique Indigenous, decolonial arts-based methods and critical frameworks for restorative and juvenile justice, healing interpersonal and complex trauma for children, adolescents, adults and collective communities.