About this Event
UNM Rainforest Innovations is hosting a Creativity and Technology on the Mother Road Seminar Series in honor of the Route 66 Centennial. This seminar series brings together panels of creative people in science, technology, and the arts, highlighting STEAM and showcasing areas where technology and creativity meet.
New Mexico is full of Creative People and Creative Places at the University of New Mexico and beyond. This series serves to build connections and bridges amongst players in the Albuquerque and New Mexico creative ecosystem and engage communities of technologists and creatives whose work and mission build towards entrepreneurial economic development for the state of New Mexico.
This panel focuses on creative people and creative places at the University of New Mexico and in the community. November panelists include:
- Moises Gonzales, Professor of Community and Regional Planning, The University of New Mexico
- Paula Castillo, Contemporary Artist
- Jakia Fuller, Multi-Disciplinary Artist
Lunch and networking start at 11:30am. Panel presentation starts at 12:00pm
Free, no cite parking available for this event.
About the Panelists:
Moises Gonzales, Professor of Community and Regional Planning, The University of New Mexico
Moises Gonzales is Professor of Urban Design in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico. He also serves as the Director of the Resource Center for Raza Planning, which is a community outreach center within the School of Architecture and Planning whose mission is to provide technical assistance in the areas of community development, design, and natural resource planning for traditional communities throughout New Mexico. Moises's teaching focus is in Physical Planning and Urban Design as well as in Historic Preservation of the Southwest.
Gonzales’ research is centered in Southwest Urbanism which is the urban form of settlements shaped by the morphology of the built environment that emerged from the dry-arid environment, cultural landscape, and colonial control of space (Spain, Mexico, and present-day United States). The production of the built environment in the Southwest region is an emergent contested urban and regional landscape facilitated by climate, colonial regulation of social rationality such as the “laws of the indies”, and the modern neo-liberal economy. His scholarly work on vernacular urban form and regional landscape has shifted slightly from spatial visualization methodology to local knowledge production in the built environment. Although traditional knowledge in the built environment is grounded in spatial and visual production, traditional knowledge is a historical collective knowledge system that is key in the generative process of the built environment. Unlike contemporary research in the discipline of Urban Design, Gonzales focus is on the regional landscape scale. community Moises employs the concept of Querencia, as a research methodology which is a community-based land ethic in New Mexico grounded in indigenous based knowledge. Querenia is a traditional community based planning and design model that can be used to protect, preserve, and generate form in the built environment.
Moises is co-editor with Enrique R. LaMadrid of the book, Nación Genízara, Ethnogenesis, Place, and Identity in New Mexico by University of New Mexico Press (2019). Moises Gonzales is also Co-Author along with Robert William Piatt, Jr. of the book, Slavery in the Southwest Genizaro Identity, Dignity and the Law by Carolina Academic Press (2019). He was awarded the 2025 Community Engaged Research Lecture Award which “recognizes exceptional scholarly work that embodies UNM's commitment to community engagement and profoundly and systematically affects the relationship between the university and the larger community in a positive and meaningful way. This is the highest award for community-engaged scholarship bestowed by the University of New Mexico.”
Paula Castillo, MFA, Contemporary Sculpture Artist
Paula Castillo is a New Mexico-based sculptor and public artist whose work explores the relationships between place, material, history, and the built environment. Raised in Belén, New Mexico, she earned her MFA in Sculpture from the University of New Mexico and has maintained a professional studio practice since 1998. Her large-scale public artworks are developed through a process that brings traditional making into conversation with digital design, engineering, fabrication, and contemporary technologies. Castillo has completed public commissions throughout New Mexico and across the United States, including recent major works for the Denver Art Museum and Denver’s Civic Center. Her work reflects a deep engagement with the landscapes, communities, and cultural histories of the American Southwest.
Jakia Fuller, Multi-Disciplinary Artist
Jakia Fuller is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, writer, and curator based in Albuquerque, NM, with roots in Detroit, MI. Fuller creates art, clothing, spaces, and experiences that provide moments of stillness, meditation, and introspection. She explores various forms and concepts of landscapes, specifically themes of intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships and experiences, expressions of self, environmental awareness, and evolving narratives of the Black diaspora. She finds that her work brings a smile to people’s faces, sparks joy, and welcomes calm and stillness.
From 2021 to 2024, Fuller spent her time learning about the art industry from behind the scenes firsthand in her role as the Executive Associate at SITE SANTA FE. In the summer of 2023, she provided curatorial support in the organizing of Deborah Roberts’ exhibition, Come walk in my shoes, and later facilitated a panel discussion between the artist and curators Ekow Eshun and Phillip Townsend. In 2024, she had the pleasure of providing support to Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition, the space in which to place me, at the US Pavilion for the 60th Venice Biennale. Fuller showcased the collection, The Modern-Day Alchemist, at Sustainable Fashion Week US and Fashion Week Brooklyn in the Fall of 2024. Since late November 2024, she has been full-time in her creative endeavors and pursuits.
She had her first solo exhibition, Oscillation, at Vital Spaces in Santa Fe, NM, in July 2025. Fuller made her curatorial debut in January 2026 with the curation of two exhibitions, The Art of ReUse, at the Richard Levy Gallery and Truth. Memory. Joy. Resistance: Black Expressions In New Mexico, at the Santa Fe Community Gallery. Recently she participated in the City of Albuquerque’s Gallery One exhibition, (Un)bound to Boundless in May 2026, and her work is currently on view in the exhibition, The Woods Before Sunrise: Environment and Place In New Mexico’s Black Contemporary, at the Albuquerque Museum. Fuller is also the inaugural fellow of the Harwood Art Center and Blue Sky Coworking NM Curatorial Fellowship from Summer 2026 to Summer 2027. Her first curated exhibition in the fellowship, Route 66: A Deep Imagining, is on view until October 2026.
Event venue & nearby stays
Lobo Rainforest, Seminar Room, 101 Broadway Boulevard Northeast, Albuquerque, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.