Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Finding his niche

Photos and story by James Hill

You’d probably never guess that a decade ago, Andrew Delaney didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do. Now, as Web Production Coordinator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and as a successful freelancer, Delaney is another one of the PCC multimedia program’s outstanding alums.

But when he started at PCC out of David Douglas High School, he could have ended up anywhere.

“I graduated from high school and didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took whatever classes I thought I might be interested in,” Delaney said.

He spent some time with a calculator, a word processor, a few novels, and a bunch of psychology and sociology textbooks. Then he found a camera.

“What changed everything was experiencing photography,” he said.

With a PCC photography class as the gateway, Delaney found his way into the Multimedia program, where he used his newfound interest in visual arts to tap into the burgeoning world of new media. He learned design. He learned video. He learned Adobe Flash. He learned Adobe Photoshop. He learned lots more on his way to a certificate in multimedia.

“The Multimedia program at PCC was good because I got a really strong foundation for what’s out there in the industry,” Delaney said.

Beth Fitzgerald, instructor and faculty chair in the Multimedia program, had plenty of complimentary adjectives to use when she spoke of Delaney in the classroom.

“Organized, committed, creative, kind and logical,” Fitzgerald said. “He worked in our lab, and we have an extremely diverse student body. Andy just kind of made everyone he worked with feel comfortable.”

After PCC, he got a certificate in the Multimedia Producer program at Portland State University, then headed south to Academy of Art University in San Francisco. There, he expanded his knowledge of programming and design with all types of media. He interned at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art his final year at AAU, then spent a year and a half with a job at a design agency. Next, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art came calling back, and hired him.