The ImaginArte development team was organized in 2005 and constituted the UCSB Research Working Group on Chicano Visual Arts. It was based in the Chicano Studies Institute. The Center is an organized research unit (ORU) of the University. Team members coalesced to lend the project their varying interdisciplinary strengths. Their scholarship embraced art, culture and race in emerging social movements, literature and folklore, film and media, theater arts, and archival science. Their collective expertise in project administration contributed to the success of this project. The Research Working Group consisted of the following members:

Carl Gutiérrez-Jones was then the Director of the Center for Chicano Studies. A Professor of English, he has been on the faculty of that department since 1990. From 2002-2005 he served as Chair of the department. He received a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1994 which helped him complete his first book, devoted to Chicano culture and its ongoing critique of racially-biased legal practices. From 2000 to 2002, he served as the Acting Director of the Center for Chicano Studies at UCSB. He has served as the Chair of the UC/MEXUS Advisory Committee and has also served on the UC Humanities Research Institute Advisory Committee.

Salvador Güereña is an archivist, curator, and writer. Güereña specializes in ethnic and multicultural archives, and in digital technologies involving Chicano/Latino arts. Since 1989 he has been Director of the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives in the Davidson Library. He is a published author and editor, including several books and numerous articles in the field of library science, bibliography, and archival science. He was editor and co-author of Library Services to Latinos: an Anthology (2000), and is co-editor and co-author of Pathways to Progress: Issues and Advances in Latino Librarianship (ABC-CLIO 2011).

Maria Herrera-Sobek is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy, Professor of Chicana/o Studies, and was also the Luis Leal Endowed Chair in Chicano Studies at UCSB. Her doctorate is in Hispanic Languages and Literature, from UCLA. She is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. She has published over 150 articles and twenty books including: The Bracero Experience: Elitelore Versus Folklore; The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis; Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song; and Chicano Folklore: A Handbook (2006). Her poetry appears in: Three Times a Woman, and she was guest editor for the Journal of American Studies (Turkey).

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