Concept Art Association

The Concept Art Association (CAA) is a U.S. nonprofit serving the professional community of concept artists working in film, television, animation, and games. It was founded by Ryan Meinerding (Head of Visual Development at Marvel Studios), talent manager Rachel Meinerding, and producer Nicole Hendrix (co-founder of the BRIC Foundation), with the mission of raising the profile and protecting the working conditions of artists whose contributions to entertainment are typically uncredited and behind the scenes. The organization runs an annual Concept Art Awards — first held at the Pasadena Convention Center in September 2019 — alongside year-round mentorship programming, panel events, and an archive partnership with the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

CAA has appeared in the make-AI-good movement primarily through its advocacy program on generative AI, launched in late 2022 in response to text-to-image systems that were trained on scraped catalogs of copyrighted artwork. The advocacy work is run as a sector-specific response — concept artists organizing to shape how generative AI is built, regulated, and contracted around — rather than a broader civil-society advocacy program.

Generative AI advocacy

The advocacy program kicked off with a GoFundMe campaign in December 2022, announced publicly by board member and concept artist Karla Ortiz. The campaign raised funds to retain Cindi Merifield of R2P Strategies — a longtime entertainment-industry lobbyist who had previously served as chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America — as CAA's federal lobbyist, and to support a coordinated public-policy and public-education push.

Subsequent activity has included:

• A series of D.C. visits beginning in 2023, with meetings in the offices of Representatives Michael McCaul, Don Beyer, Ted Lieu, and Darrell Issa, and Senators Martin Heinrich and Dick Durbin, plus a virtual meeting with the FTC's Acting Director of Privacy and Identity Protections.
• Participation in the FTC's Creative Economy and Generative AI roundtable on October 4, 2023, where Karla Ortiz and Steven Zapata represented CAA on a panel of creator-group representatives. The roundtable transcript and the FTC's subsequent staff report (December 15, 2023) reference CAA's framing of how AI training on artists' work affects the creative economy.
• Continued state-level engagement — including coalition work on California legislation that would require AI developers to disclose training data — reported alongside other artist-led groups.
• A model contract rider that artists can attach to work-for-hire contracts and license agreements to refuse the addition of their work to generative-AI training datasets without consent.

CAA's profile is closely entwined with the artist-led wave of litigation over generative-AI training data. Karla Ortiz is one of the named plaintiffs in Andersen v. Stability AI, the class-action copyright case filed in January 2023 against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and (later) Runway; the case is not formally a CAA action, but the organization's advocacy and the lawsuit's plaintiffs are publicly intertwined.

Structure

CAA operates with two related entities — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that runs community, awards, and educational programming, and Concept Art Association, LLC, a publishing and media arm that supports artist projects through art-book publishing and serves as the federal lobbying registrant. Its board has publicly included Karla Ortiz alongside artists Mike Uwandi, Greg Hopwood, Jeanette Moreno King, and Iain McCaig. Day-to-day operations are run by a small team of staff and volunteer artists; the AI advocacy work is led visibly by Karla Ortiz and Steven Zapata, with Cindi Merifield handling the federal lobbying engagements.

Posture in the movement

CAA's distinguishing role in the broader make-AI-good corpus is that it is not, in origin, an AI-policy organization at all — it is a professional community for entertainment concept artists that pivoted into AI advocacy when generative tools began drawing on their members' uncredited work. That makes CAA part of a wider sectoral wave (alongside writers' and performers' unions, the Graphic Artists Guild, and the Authors Guild) of professional-community organizing around generative AI. The organization's framing tends to start from working conditions, consent, and the basic mechanics of how art is made, rather than from existential or societal-risk arguments — a register that has been effective at translating AI-policy questions to audiences who otherwise sit outside both AI and policy circles.