Your creative retreat since 2009
What We Do
​
Art Factory Studios is a community-centered artistic hub. Facilitating creative experiences through education, and events since 2009, Art Factory Studios creates impactful, artistic opportunities for corporations, adults and children – at in-person, destination and virtual locations. Corporate clients include; Apple, Adobe Systems, Applied Survey Research, Cabrillo College, Premiere Capital One, Safeway, County Park Friends of Santa Cruz County, Live Like Coco Foundation and many more. Whether you are seeking a corporate team building event or youth art instruction we bring you the gift of incredibly thoughtful services that usher you into the vast possibilities of the creative sphere.
Art Factory instructors bring cross-curricular experience to art education, using art as a medium to explore everything from history to mathematics to science. With an emphasis on art history, technique and creative expression, students will develop or expand their art practice. Our classes are held in a positive, non-competitive environment.
​
©2023 Art Factory
​
Yvette Contois; Director and Art Instructor
With an early love for Art and Art Education, Yvette began her formal education in Philadelphia, starting as a high school student attending Moore College of Art. She went on to receive her Degree in Visual Communications & Graphic Design at The Art Institute of Philadelphia and soon after, received her BFA & K-12 Art Teaching Certification from Rosemont College, PA.
Yvette has been giving art lessons to adults & children since 1990. Her guiding passion is bringing art into the lives of her students and building strong creative teams in the workplace.
Art Factory Studios has been Yvette’s creative vision, long before it opened in the Spring of 2009. She enjoys the studio’s continual growth and looks forward to the future expansion of its programs, to serve more of our county’s youth, teen and adult community.
When not in the studio/classroom, Yvette continues her freelance career as a technical illustrator and commercial artist and creative team builder. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.
​
Grace Corcoran
Studio Art Instructor
Grace is a practicing artist and educator and recently received her BA from UCSC in 2024 with working primarily in both painting and printmaking. She has been working with student artists since 2018 and is invested in promoting accessible and encouraging art education for all. In her personal practice she is invested in form, figure, and abstraction and continually strives to investigate the relationship between medium and meaning. She hopes to embolden all students to question and explore all corners of their creative minds through drawing, painting, and printmaking through critical observation and expressive study.
David Fremont
Comics Instructor
David Fremont grew up in Fremont, California—yep, a Fremont from Fremont! He loved watching Underdog cartoons, reading comics and drawing with his brother. When David was 11, his cousin showed him a super cool shark comic that he had drawn, inspiring David to start drawing his own comics. When David grew up, he moved across the Bay to San Francisco, where he got a job painting cartoons at an animation studio. While at Colossal Pictures, he created projects for Cartoon Network and Disney. After moving to Los Angeles, he created a pilot for Nickelodeon and an online kids series for DreamWorksTV, called Public Pool.
Sami Moses
Studio Manager
Sami was an excellent student; her teachers’ only qualms being that she doodled in the margins of nearly every assignment she ever turned in! She graduated from the Visual Arts Conservatory at the Orange County School of the Arts and went on to achieve her B.S. in Ecology & Evolution and her M.A. in Education from UCSC. After serving as a middle school teacher and as her school’s Science Instructional Leader for several years, she joined us as Studio Manager to not only lead in scheduling and operations, but to support art instructors in refining their art curriculum and classroom management to drive impactful arts education here at AFS!
John McKinley
Studio Art Instructor
John began drawing at an early age and followed his passion to a long career in commercial illustration. After attending Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, John pursued freelance jobs in editorial art, advertising, character design, and most recently children's books. Locally John is a regular in the Santa Cruz Arts Council Open Studios Tour.
John loves creating amusing characters from his imagination and drawing subjects from the natural world. He believes improved drawing skills are available to everyone through practice and patience.
​
Jason Matthews
Character Illustration Instructor
Jason earned his Studio Art degree from Cabrillo College in 2020, and began his role at the Art factory shortly thereafter. He currently teaches Character Illustration, a remote drawing class that introduces students to the magical world of visual storytelling.
His professional endeavors have included graphic design, storyboarding, game development and caricature art. In his downtime, he broadens his creative horizons by capturing illustrious nature photography.
Tiina Seppalainen
Artful Administrter
Tiina is a self-taught landscape artist and painter of nature. A native of Finland, she grew up exploring the natural world and doing art from a young age. Retiring from a tech career allowed her to dedicate time to her painting practice and continue her art education. She uses water-based media to represent our unique coastal areas. Tiina was selected to participate in the 2023 Capitola Plein Air. She regards art as a never-ending journey that teaches us how to really see, soothes our souls, and brings beauty into the world.
