Our Founder

Cynthia Tom is the founding director of A PLACE OF HER OWN™ (PLACE), an art-based healing program created in 2009 during her artist residency at the de Young Museum. With over 40 years as a practicing visual artist and community arts leader, Cynthia founded PLACE in response to her own healing journey and a deep need for culturally grounded spaces where women and communities of color could explore family history, ancestral trauma, self-agency, and empowerment through creative practice. Since its founding, PLACE has continued to evolve through workshops, exhibitions, lectures, and long-term community partnerships rooted in care, curiosity, and lived experience.

Cynthia’s work is grounded in a spiritual belief in art as a vehicle for healing, transformation, and social justice. Influenced early on by Puerto Rican artist Cris Matos, she developed a deep awareness of how unaddressed trauma moves through individuals, families, and communities, often silently and across generations. Through the process of unraveling her own familial trauma patterns and confronting what she calls her “Hungry Ghosts,” Cynthia experienced personal transformation through artmaking. These creative practices, developed not as prescriptions, but as “ lived” tools, form the foundation of PLACE and continue to evolve alongside the communities she serves.

As a San Francisco visual artist, curator, and educator, Cynthia’s 40-year practice centers ancestral healing, feminism, spirituality, and social justice. She is a California Arts Council LEGACY Artist (curated by YouthSpeaks) and AAWAA Director and Board President Emerita, where her leadership and curatorial work further shaped her exploration of Asian American and feminist identity. Encouraged early on by African American artist and mentor JoeSam to work directly from her cultural roots, Cynthia learned to trust her lived experience as both source, medium and strategy. Her feminist artistry draws inspiration from artists and writers including Remedios Varo, Barbara Mumby-Huerta, Manon Wada, Irene Wibawa, and Genny Lim.

Cynthia’s impact extends beyond galleries and workshops. Her contributions are included in the Smithsonian American Art Archives’ “What is Feminist Art?” and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA)—recognition of a practice that bridges personal narrative, collective memory, and cultural history. She is a recipient of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Creative Capacity Award for her collaborative work with Asian American clinical therapists, expanding access to mental health wellness and holistic healing practices for underserved and unserved communities. In 2024, she was named one of the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area Coalition (PAAWBAC) Woman Warriors for her work with community through the arts, and is honored by Cantadora Wines as one of their “Women Who Do Extraordinary Things for Community.”

Cynthia is also a certified SoulCollage® Facilitator and a Pattern Breakthrough Coach™ with Creative Energy Options under Sylvia Lafair, PhD. These tools complement, but do not define her work. At the core of PLACE is an artist-led, community-centered approach that values process over outcome, relationship over rightness, and agency over expertise.

Working across painting, found objects, mixed media, and installation, Cynthia creates visual meditations that invite both maker and viewer to challenge the status quo and imagine a world where empowerment, kindness, curiosity, and wonder are not radical acts, but everyday practices. PLACE is not separate from her art practice; it is an extension of it, alive, relational, and rooted in the belief that healing happens in layers, in community, and over time.