Bio
Tessa Hicks Peterson is a scholar activist, teacher, administrator, and facilitator. She is Assistant Vice President of Community Engagement and Professor of Urban Studies at Pitzer College. Her duties since she arrived at Pitzer in 2006 have included both teaching and administration, including directing the Community Engagement Center (CEC), the Office for Consortial Academic Collaboration (OCAC), the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, and Critical Action + Social Advocacy (CASA). Tessa has been teaching social responsibility praxis courses every semester for nearly 20 years in the CASA Pitzer, community-based research and engagement program.
Before coming to Pitzer, Tessa worked for almost a decade in community-based organizations throughout Los Angeles on human relations and civil rights issues, anti-bias education training for teachers, and community-based education. She has a Masters and PhD in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University and a BA in Psychology with a focus on Sociology and Spanish from UC Santa Cruz.
Tessa has authored or co-authored seven books and over a dozen book chapters and articles. Her scholarship centers on transformative movement organizing and healing justice, community-based education and research, social change theories and movements, decolonization and indigenous knowledge, and prison education and abolition. Tessa focuses her work on advancing community-campus partnerships for social change and is on the boards of multiple nonprofits.
Tessa has also been a practitioner for over 25 years in Vinyasa Yoga and Afro-Brazilian dance in the tradition of the Orixas. Tessa finds great joy in these spiritual movement traditions as well as in spending time with her family. Born and raised in Venice Beach, Tessa has spent the last 15 years living among the bears and the wildfires of the foothills of Sierra Madre. Tessa’s ultimate work in the world is to engage with, teach about, and better connect healing*arts*education*& justice.
Tessa Hicks Peterson 