Meet the Team

Isabella Van Ranzow is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist, muralist, photographer, DJ, teaching artist, and community organizer whose practice centers public art, arts education, and work with system-impacted youth. For more than five years, she has facilitated arts programming throughout Los Angeles County juvenile camps and halls, schools, parks, and community spaces, using creative practice as a tool for self-expression, skill-building, collaboration, and community connection.

Working across muralism, photography, illustration, mixed media, radio and podcasting, and music production, Isabella approaches art as both a creative practice and a means of restoring agency. Her work as a Lead Teaching Artist has focused primarily on incarcerated and system-impacted youth, developing culturally relevant arts programming that introduces young people to new creative practices while building technical, interpersonal, and vocational skills.

Muralism is central to Isabella’s practice. She has worked alongside youth and community members to develop and execute large-scale public artworks through a collaborative process that includes community dialogue, conceptual development, design, scaling, color theory, painting, and installation. Her approach to mural-making emphasizes representation and the importance of young people having a meaningful role in shaping the environments they inhabit.

Her work extends beyond the classroom and mural wall into photography, community organizing, and reentry advocacy. She has documented programs and community events serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and works collaboratively with community-based organizations to strengthen continuity of services for young people as they transition from incarceration back into their communities.

Isabella is the founder and Executive Director of Friends, Family, and Neighbors, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit created to provide arts education, vocational training, workforce development, and reentry-focused programming for incarcerated and system-impacted youth. Through the organization, she develops arts curricula that connect creative education during incarceration with tangible skills, employment pathways, and continued access to community resources following release.

She holds a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Visual Arts, Religion, and Psychology from Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York City. Her multidisciplinary background informs a practice grounded in representation, cultural arts, community collaboration, and the belief that access to creative expression can help young people build agency over their own stories, environments, and futures.