Andi Michele Brandenburg
Street photographer / mixed media artist +
owner Besos Not Bombs

Latina, Armenian American adopted into a German Jewish family raised on the border later to spend adult life living between SF and Asia. Growing up with a mixed race and cross-cultural background lead Andi to speak a language she calls "Jaspanglish," a combination of Japanese, English, and Spanish. Language plays an important role in her work.
Andi grew up during the height of the hip hop and punk rock era influenced by street culture, graffiti, raw photos from glen e friedman and art from jean-michel basquiat. Subjects of her work range from identity, roots, race, genocide, and marginalized people struggles to the documentation of breakin, skateboarding , and underground street culture worldwide. She combines the street element with that of the village.

A completely untrained artist, she creates from the corazon. She has a love for anything Latin especially musicians such as willie colon y hector lavoe. She feels these are her true roots and something that has been with her since before time. She has a degree in cultural anthropology and Southeast Asian studies from UCSC where she completed her year long thesis while living in a village before the uprisings in Indonesia in the nineties. While living in Java, she documented ghost stories and their relation to contemporary Indonesian religion and played gamelon music with the village elders..

In the late nineties, she spent several years living in Tokyo writing about street fashion and underground Tokyo trends and working as a hip hop photographer for Tommy Boy Records, Tokyo with English photographer Andy Beezer. In addition, she worked as a VJ in a mix of Japanese hip hop and punk rock clubs for Kazenohito Bito, her crew in Tokyo. Due to illness, she returned to SD at a time when "Blackmarket" was a strong presence in the city and street art shows like "modest behaviour" were on the rize....

Shortly after, the war on Iraq broke out. Fighting illness, she continued to attend the local anti war protests. With no end in sight and discouraged by American conservatism, she left the country to live in the political Gracia District of Spain, where anti-war protests and anti-war sentiment filled the walls and streets. There, she spent several months creating a new body of work and the clothing line "besos not bombs."