About Us
The California Institute of Arts and Letters was founded as a 501(c)(3) organization in 2003 under the vision and leadership of Jeff Munnis. Jeff founded the Institute with the help of Stelli Munnis, Mark Yoslow, and Jessica Duttlinger.
CIAL's mission is to create and maintain conversations that matter through publishing, peer support networks, and community events. We are especially interested in prophetic voices, and visionary artists—those who challenge our conscious understanding of purpose, place and meaning. We would like those involved to feel they are making a meaningful contribution to the humanities and art through our programs and publishing efforts.
"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour."
—John Berger