Claudia DaMetz

Claudia was born in Mexico City in 1956, at the historic French/Swiss/Belgian Hospital. Her father is from Bilbao, Spain and she was raised with a mixture of Basque, French and Mexican traditions. In her Catholic school she helped tutor illiterate adults. She was 14 when she got polio vacationing in Acapulco (just when the vaccine was available). Refusing to be a victim, she claims that _becoming a teen paraplegic was surprisingly not as hard as people might think _the hard times were always made easier by the support and love of my family._
She went on to study Art History and Graphic Design and then came to SDSU where she met her husband James in 1980.

Her interest in art came from her grandparents and artist mother who collected museum quality pre-colonial, colonial and modern Mexican art. She studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and after her kids Veronica and André were born, she worked as a designer, lived in Spain, then returned to San Diego to work at Miramar College. She also graduated with Honors from Cal State University San Marcos. After years of teaching disabled students how to use adapted computers and software for college, she became Marketing Director at the Epicentre, a Mira Mesa teen center.

In 2001 she became a Computer Specialist/Web Designer at the Dept. of Communication at UCSD where her artistic talents met her interests in communication theory and media production. Her reputation as a world-class graphic designer has been flourishing via her graphic/webdesign firm http://www.dametzdesign.com/
Claudia has worked with the Women’s International Center for two years and is a mentor for Accessible Society http://www.accessiblesociety.org/.