Staff

Executive Director: Laura Ratcliffe

Office Manager: Beth Hansen

Program Assistant: Nayamin Cisneros

Bios

Laura Ratcliffe/Director

Laura has an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago and a BA in Visual Art from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her background is in graphic design and arts administration with a recent focus on education, particularly early childhood education. She has been the Assistant Director and Program Coordinator at the Zia Family Focus Center prior to becoming Director this past July. Her son attended Zia Elementary school and she has volunteered at Zia, been a substitute at APS and Serendipity Pre-school and worked as an Assistant Teacher at Zia in both kinder and visually impaired classrooms and at Kirtland Elementary in the developmentally delayed preschool.

Before focusing on education Laura was the Program Director and Curator of Visual and Performing Arts at the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque. She has curated at the local and national level and done volunteer and contract work for The Albuquerque Museum and SITE Santa Fe. She co-founded and was project Director for the Window Project, funded by the McCune Foundation. The Window Project was both an art event and ongoing exhibition devoted to presenting contemporary art installations in non-traditional venues, focusing on local downtown Albuquerque businesses. Her alternate career has been in horticulture, where she learned a great deal about native plants while employed by the Albuquerque Biological Park and Plants of the Southwest.

Beth Hansen/Office Manager

Beth Hansen graduated from UNM with a BA in Cinematic Arts and Art Studio. Beth began working at Zia Family Focus Center as an instructor in 2017, co-teaching acting classes and filmmaking classes. She went on to work as the Program Assistant in 2018, and currently acts as the ZFFC office Manager. Beth also works with local arts organizations, as vice president of Basement Films (film archive, experimental microcinema, and artist collective) and co-curator of Fourteenfifteen Gallery (an art gallery in Barelas).

Nayamin Cisneros/Program Assistant

Nayamin Cisneros started as a volunteer at ZFFC in 2017, in the Spring of 2019 she taught several classes including Cooking, Recycled Art, Outdoor Explorers and more! She loves the ZFFC community and became part of the staff in August 2019. Nayamin has her Associates degree in Human Services plus 8 years of clerical experience. She is bi-lingual and a native Spanish speaker. Nayamin has three young children and enjoys being around kids of all ages. She is also the Executive Director of the Coral Foundation for Excellence in Education.