Stephen Beal is a professor of painting and drawing as well as the current President of the California College of the Arts. He has been exhibited in the Bay Area, Chicago, and throughout the Midwest. He serves on the board of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and he is board president of the internationally renowned Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, which fosters and promotes the art of people with physical, developmental, and emotional disabilities. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.