Episode #149 – Arabela Espinoza
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Arabela Espinoza got her start with a camera growing up on the Eastside of San Jose. She remembers family gatherings documented with disposables and the transition to digital when she would swipe the camera her mom used for work before receiving her own as a gift. With a mother who worked long hours, Espinoza spent her afternoons in elementary school waiting for a ride home, filling the time with after-school programs. Though she didn’t grow up in a family of “capital-A Artists”, a fourth-grade Polaroid manipulation workshop stood out—teaching her to scratch, burn, and pour liquids onto developing film, showing her early on the different ways humans can capture and manipulate images.
By high school, Espinoza was shooting constantly, initially using self-portraits to get comfortable behind the lens and learn her camera gear. When classmates misread her self-portraits as self-absorbed, she shifted her focus outward, taking portraits of the people around her to highlight their presence instead. After graduating, she enrolled at San José State University (SJSU) to study forensic science—a choice driven by her mother’s desire for a practical, stable career. Realizing science wasn’t her path, Espinoza eventually switched her major to advertising, finding a way to balance her creative interests with applicable business strategy.
It was during a studio lighting class at SJSU that Espinoza met her long-time creative partner, Elle Mott. After interning and shooting editorial features for Content Magazine, the duo co-founded Weekend Creative—a commercial creative agency specializing in art direction and product photography for national brands. Over eight years, they built a recognizable aesthetic around color, composition, and texture, while making a point to pull back the curtain on the industry by sharing behind-the-scenes processes and educational resources with emerging photographers.
Now, following the sunsetting of Weekend Creative, Espinoza’s creative practice is turning inward. Her latest project steps away from commercial sets to focus on family, memory, attachment, and loss—a body of work sparked in part by her brother’s incarceration. Rather than taking new photographs, Espinoza dug through her family’s archives to pull old snapshots of herself and her brother, using the physical prints as canvases for intricate hand-stitching.
The embroidery acts as a visual metaphor for perspective. Growing up in the same household, Espinoza and her brother experienced their childhood in vastly different ways. By printing the same archive photos twice and applying distinct stitching patterns to each, Espinoza explores how emotional inheritance, survival mechanisms, and memory shape the way we process trauma and familial relationships. What began as an exercise in confronting loss has become a meditative process of deconstruction and repair.
In this conversation, Espinoza talks about moving from high school portraiture to editorial work, running a commercial creative agency, and shifting into personal, conceptual art.
Espinoza is artist-in-residence for the August 2026 edition of The Haberdasher Shows, presenting mixed-media work in her first-ever art exhibition at Haberdasher in downtown San Jose as part of the official San José Jazz Summer Fest Pre-Party.
Website: arabelaespinoza.com | weekend-creative.com
Instagram: arabelaespinoza | weekendcreative
- Arabela #1, 2026, printed family photograph stitched with colored cotton thread
- Carlos #1, 2026, printed family photograph stitched with colored cotton thread
- Arabela and Carlos, 2026, printed family photograph stitched with colored cotton thread
- Portrait by Jazzie Bridges
