Deborah Cullinan: Executive Director, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Deborah Cullinan is the newly named Executive Director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – San Francisco’s premiere contemporary art center. She is the outgoing Executive Director of Intersection for the Arts. Under her leadership, Intersection achieved a strong reputation as a powerful arts-focused community development organization committed to radical partnership across sectors to achieve equitable community change. Intersection is playing a lead role on the 5M Project, a 4-acre prototype for the next generation of urban development that embraces diversity of thought, life experience, and culture. Under her leadership, Intersection received numerous awards including an Inaugural ArtPlace America Award, The Cyril Magnum Award for Non-Profit Excellence, and the 2012 Philanthropedia Award for Highest Impact Arts Non-Profit in the Bay Area. She has presented at the NEA, SF Planning and Urban Research Center, Center for the Theater Commons, GrantMakers in the Arts and more. She is co-founder of ArtsForumSF; a member of the Board of the California Arts Advocates, Californians for the Arts, and The Community Arts Stabilization Trust. She is on the advisory boards of The Center for the Theater Commons and The Catalyst Initiative. She received the 2013 Visionary Leadership Award in Honor of Margo Jones from Theater Communications Group. She is a Rockwood Fellow; a Gerbode Fellow; and a participant in National Arts Strategies’ Chief Executive Program an initiative gathering 100 top culture sector leaders to re-imagine what cultural institutions are and how they contribute to society.

Marina Gorbis: Executive Director, Institute For The Future

Marina Gorbis is a futurist and social scientist who serves as executive director to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley nonprofit research and consulting organization. In her 14 years with IFTF, Marina has brought a futures perspective to hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, and design new products and services.

Marina’s current research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries, a topic explored in detail in her book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. She has also blogged and written for BoingBoing.net, FastCompany, Harvard Business Review, and major media outlets. A native of Odessa, Ukraine, yet equally at home in Silicon Valley, Europe, India, and Kazakhstan, Marina is particularly well suited to see things from a global viewpoint. She has keynoted such international events as the World Economic Forum, The Next Web Conference, NEXT Berlin, the World Business Forum, the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention, and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges annual conference. She holds a BA in psychology and a master’s of public policy from UC Berkeley.

Jen Pahlka: Founder and executive director of Code for America, former Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America. She recently served as the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is known for her TED talk, Coding a Better Government, and is the recipient of several awards, including the Oxford Internet Institute’s Internet and Society Award, MIT’s Kevin Lynch Award, and National Democratic Institute’s Democracy Award. She spent eight years at CMP Media where she ran the Game Developers Conference and related properties. Previously, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O'Reilly Media. Jennifer’s early career was spent in the non-profit sector. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, Calif. with her daughter, fiance, and seven chickens.

Patricia Maloney: Director, Art Practical and Daily Serving

Patricia Maloneyis the founding editor and director of Art Practical. In 2013, she also became the publisher of the international online art journal Daily Serving. She is a senior correspondent and producer for the weekly contemporary art podcast Bad at Sports and has written for Artforum, ArtChronika, the Brooklyn Rail, and Meatpaper, as well as for numerous exhibition catalogues. Between 2000 and 2012, she held curatorial positions at Ampersand International Arts in San Francisco; the MATRIX Program of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum; and the Mori Art Museum (MAM) in Tokyo, Japan. From 1999 to 2002, she was a Program Associate for the International Program at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Maloney has received writing residencies from the Philadelphia Art Hotel, the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Cannonball in Miami, and the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, TX. She holds her MA in Theory and History of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is an Associate Professor in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.

Shannon Jackson: Director, Arts Research Center (ARC) U.C. Berkeley
and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow

Shannon Jackson currently holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in the Arts and Humanities at UC-Berkeley where she also directs the Arts Research Center. As a scholar and organizer, her work focuses on collaboration across the arts and on the role of the arts in movements for social justice. In addition to her recent book, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, she also a edited a spring special issue of Art Practical on Valuing Labor in the Arts. Previous work has explored the relation between performance and Progressive Era social reform (Lines of Activity) and between performance and the discipline of higher education (Professing Performance). Jackson serves on the boards of Cal Performance, BAMPFA, the English Institute, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts. As ARC Director, Jackson organizes numerous workshops, symposia, think tanks, and lectures on the vitality and sustainability of the arts and cultural sectors, including an upcoming series devoted to Art, Activism, and Technology.

Kakul Srivastava: Chief Product Officer, WeWork

Kakul Srivastava is the CPO of WeWork, a leading collaborative co-working, co-living space provider, and formerly CEO of Tomfoolery and General Manager of Flickr Kakul Srivastava is CEO and co-founder of Tomfoolery, a mobile-first startup dedicated to building amazing apps for work. Over her 15 year career, Kakul has helped build some of the most loved consumer products ever – Adobe’s Photoshop line of products, Flickr, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Mail. Kakul is a graduate of MIT with a BSME in Mechanical Engineering and Biotech, and also holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley Haas school of business. She serves as Co-Chair of the Cure Violence Advisory Board and published several papers in peer reviewed journals about protein biochemistry and the pathways that lead to Alzheimer’s Disease and Downs’ Syndrome.

Tina Barseghian: Senior Editor at IDEO

Formerly editor in chief of MindShift at KQED/NPR, Craft Magazine and Maker Faire, and ReadyMade Magazine.
Tina Barseghian is an experienced editor, writer, and producer who creates engaging content across a broad range of topics. She’s worked for a number of award-winning websites, magazines, and newspapers.

Heather Hood: Director of Programs, Enterprise Community Partners

Heather Hood directs Enterprise’s Northern California teams working on green affordable housing, transit oriented development, public housing revitalization and foreclosure response. She works with Enterprise’s national initiative focused on the implementation of transit-oriented community policies, funds and implementation. Previously, Heather worked at The San Francisco Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation as the Initiative Officer managing the Great Communities Collaborative, an initiative focusing on equitable smart growth in the Bay Area. She has served on the Boards of the American Institute of Architects, the Center for Urban Family Life, and the California Architecture Foundation and now currently serves on Greenbelt Alliance’s Policy Board, and advises the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission on select studies. Heather earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master of Architecture and a Master of City Planning from University of California, Berkeley.

Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen: Founder/Director, A Simple Collective

Rhiannon MacFayden, Founder/Director of A Simple Collective and former Marketing Director of Catharine Clark Gallery
A San Francisco native, Rhiannon is an independent consultant for artists, small institutions, and budding collectors. Rhiannon has over fifteen years experience in the commercial art world, gaining a wide skill-set that ranges from marketing and management to installation and sales. She has worked as a design and brand consultant for artists and small businesses and spent her early days as a performer and creative consultant for a number of folkloric performance companies in the Bay Area, senior sales staff and assistant buyer at a specialty gift store, and kindergarten art teacher. With a BFA in Fine Art and Commercial Photography, she is also an artist, writer, curator. Deeply involved with several community-building, cultural, and arts marketing organizations, she spearheaded the creation and curation of Yerba Buena Night: the free outdoor arts festival in downtown San Francisco, now in its fourth year; is on the Advisory Board for WEAD (Women’s Environmental Artist Directory); and she continually works to promote access and independence in the arts through education and professional development for creative entrepreneurs.

Christian L. Frock: Independent curator and writer

Christian L. Frock is an independent writer and curator based in the Bay Area. Frock’s practice interrogates the intersection of art, daily life and popular culture through a consideration of art in public spaces. Invisible Venue, the curatorial enterprise founded and directed by Frock since 2005, collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings. Her writing has been featured in Fillip Review, art ltd, Art Practical, SFArts.org, Art&Education, and NPR.org, among others. She was a 2009 fellow in the Arts Writers Workshop organized by AICA/USA and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation and a 2008 Alternative Exposure Grant recipient awarded by Southern Exposure. Frock possesses a BA in art and art history from San Jose State University and an MA in curatorial practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she learned, above all else, to value California sunshine.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), Inc.

GAFFTA is a 501©3 Non-Profit Organization supporting Art and Technology for Social Good. Their mission is to apply digital art and technology to create positive social impact. Through education, research and public programs, GAFFTA tests and scales projects with high impact potential, teaches digital tools to support artists and technologists and inspires the community by promoting meaningful new work.

Cedric Brown: Managing Partner of the Kapor Center for Social Impact

Cedric Brown is the Managing Partner of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, overseeing programs and philanthropic partnerships. He has over 20 years of experience as an funder and activist, steering over $60 million in grants to community efforts. In his current role, he works to devise and implement strategies to build a tech community that mirrors the dynamically diverse population of California. His recent projects include creating or advising Live WorkOakland’s tech ecosystem database, Brothers Code, #YesWeCode, 2.Oakland, and Vator Splash Oakland. Cedric was recognized as a Champion for Change by Startup Weekend Oakland - Black Male Achievement, a Champion for Youth by the East Oakland Development Center, and a Changemaker by the San Francisco Chronicle. Cedric is a proud board member and supporter of Color of Change.org. He also has a long history as an artist and performer, and is a self-published author. Cedric holds degrees from the University of North Carolina and Stanford University and executive certificates from Georgetown and Rutgers universities.

Jake Levitas: Senior Advisor,Market Street Prototyping Festival

City of SF Planning Department

Kristy Wang: Community Planning Director, SPUR

Kristy Wang leads SPUR’s work in community planning and housing. Her focus includes neighborhood plans and project review in San Francisco and urban village plans in San Jose. Prior to joining SPUR, Kristy was a project manager at BRIDGE Housing Corporation, one of California’s largest affordable housing developers, where she worked all around the Bay Area, including projects in the three central cities of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. She currently sits on the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation Board of Directors. Kristy earned master’s degrees in city planning and real estate development from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in architecture and urban studies from Yale College. She was also a Public Policy Fellow at the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. A Palo Alto native, Kristy lives in San Francisco and enjoys cooking and eating with her husband and two sons.

Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada: Public Matters - Community Driven Arts Practices

Public Matters is an interdisciplinary California-based social enterprise comprised of artists, media professionals and educators. We design and implement integrated new media, education and civic engagement projects that yield long-term community benefits. We offer consulting services in program design + implementation, curriculum development, cultural + visual production, new media, community-building and leadership development.

Mike Blockstein, Principal, is a visual artist and educator working in cross-disciplinary community-based public art projects that utilize a sense of place as a mechanism to address social, cultural and built environments. Connecting artistic processes, leadership development and civic engagement, he has created and led projects nationally with youth, community development and arts organizations. Among his projects is A Chinatown Banquet, a nationally recognized art, education, and leadership development project about Boston Chinatown in conjunction with the Asian Community Development Corporation. The former Executive Director of Southern Exposure, a San Francisco nonprofit artists’ organization, and a former Board President of the National Association of Artists’ Organizations, Mike holds a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Reanne Estrada, Creative Director, is an internationally exhibiting visual artist whose diverse practice includes installation, performance, video and public art. She worked for nine years as an educator and in cause-related marketing, design, and curatorial programming at Creative Growth Art Center, an internationally recognized studio and gallery for artists with disabilities. Her public art projects emphasize a collaborative approach and focus on community narratives in Asian American communities. Reanne has an A.B. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University.

Dylan Hendricks: Video Producer + Designer, Institute for the Future (IFTF)

Dylan’s interest in media has always revolved around a belief that good storytelling is the most essential tool for advancing new ideas in society. In that effort, he has been eagerly riding the crest of innovation that has radically disrupted the media landscape over the last several decades. Along the way Dylan has produced prominent videos and motion graphics for large tech companies such as Adobe and Salesforce, and helped innovative non-profits to better tell their story through micro-documentaries and animated visualizations. As a video producer and designer at the Institute for the Future, he is pursuing new ways to communicate the trends and paradigms that are transforming the fabric of twenty-first century life.Dylan has a B.A. in Psychology and Religion from Bryn Athyn College, PA.

Sara Skvirsky: Research Manager, Ten-Year Forecast, Institute for the Future (IFTF)

Sara brings a diverse background in the fields of education, community organizing, and social justice advocacy to her work as a research manager for the Ten-Year Forecast program. Having spent several years in Latin America and Spain before joining IFTF in 2011, she approaches futures thinking from a deeply global perspective. In addition to being a member of the Ten-Year Forecast team, Sara has worked with media companies, foundations, educational institutions, government agencies, and industry clients on projects relating to the future of learning, future work skills, international cooperation, and community engagement, among other topics. She’s an experienced game guide on IFTF’s Foresight Engine platform. Sara’s primary research interests include community engagement around the future of learning, as well as Latin American education and well-being futures. Before arriving at IFTF, Sara worked for Amigos de las Américas in Ecuador, where she managed an international team to establish a youth leadership and community development volunteer program and cultivated partnerships across a wide variety of NGOs. She spearheaded the creation of an educational curriculum to explore issues of citizenship and civic participation among youth and developed materials for the preservation of local art and culture in the heavily indigenous Andean region where she worked. Sara holds a BA in Latin American studies and Spanish from Oberlin College.

Nicolas Weidinger: Research + Design, Institute for the Future (IFTF)

Nicolas has a passion for seeking novel technologies and exploring the impact they have on daily life. With a background in industrial design, Nicolas has hands on experience with what it means to be a toolmaker. During his studies, Nicolas began to see the profound effect that the Internet has on the objects we make and the tools that we use in our daily lives. His strong desire to study the internet-driven evolution of our tools, and subsequently that of humanity, led Nicolas to work with the Institute for the Future. Follow Nic on Twitter: @DrWeidinger

David Evan Harris: Social Change Agent, Institute for the Future (IFTF)

David brings an international perspective and a deep passion for social justice to his roles as IFTF’s social change agent and member of the Ten-Year Forecast and Governance Futures Lab core teams. As social change agent, he works to bring a critical social activist perspective to IFTF’s work. He is responsible for strategically identifying and developing collaborations that contribute to IFTF research, with a special focus on social action organizations and initiatives. He also contributes regularly to the Technology Horizons, Health Horizons, and Global Food Outlook programs. His research across programs focuses on poverty and inequality, development, geopolitics, political economy, social movements, and new media technology. A cross-disciplinary mediamaker, David founded the Global Lives Project, a growing video library of life experience; wrote and directed newscasts for CurrentTV; and penned articles and shot photos for the BBC, the Guardian, Adbusters, Focus on the Global South, AlterNet, and Grist. He has spoken publicly about his work to audiences at the Smithsonian, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, United Nations University, Apple, Google, Adobe, and numerous other venues around the world. He speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. David joined IFTF in 2008 and holds a BA in the political economy of development and environment, with a minor in forest science, from UC Berkeley and an MS in sociology from the University of São Paulo.

Tessa Finlev: Research Manager, Ten-Year Forecast, Institute for the Future (IFTF)

As research manager for the Ten-Year Forecast program, Tessa has a special interest in social responsibility, international development, and building effective social change movements. She came to IFTF as a program manager for the Ten-Year Forecast team in 2008 with a degree in anthropology and experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. When she later temporarily left IFTF to attend graduate school at Fordham University, she began to look critically at the role futures thinking might play in helping people break out of cycles of violence. Enamored with the process of creating foresight, she returned to IFTF at the start of 2012. Tessa’s current work is focused on building inclusive futures and moving beyond violent conflict into futures without fear. She is interested in facilitating a broader understanding of Africa, particularly leveraging the continent’s experience in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world to build resilience globally. More recently, Tessa has begun to look into how humans as a species might be evolving into something different from what we are today, with massive implications for how we build the world around us. She holds a BA in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz and an MA in international political economy and development from Fordham University. Follow Tessa on Twitter: @futressa

Alex Goldman, Research Manager, Technology Horizons

With a background in Videogame Production/Design and Politics, Alex Goldman brings a systems-scale perspective to IFTF by combining an understanding of how complex multi-user environments are designed, experienced, and tested. He is passionate about researching how new ways to organize group efforts, collaborate, cooperate, and compete are solving human problems. In his role with IFTF, Alex conducts strategic research on emerging technologies and how they impact the landscape of human interactions—whether with machines or other human beings. Alex has a special interest in the future of entertainment, particularly the expanding role of gaming and games-thinking on society. He is also interested in how the interface shapes the experience—in other words, how the changing field of interfaces impacts why and how people use computers and technology. Alex holds a BA in Politics from Brandeis University and a Masters in Entertainment Technology from the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

15 Artists Envision Future Cities (Grand Lobby) Curated by Institute for the Future and Betti-Sue Hertz

#sfopencity
Brett Snyder and Claire Napawan | @sf_opencity
The future of cities requires critical examination of the present urban condition, exposing the ubiquitous and challenging the ineffectual. This project highlights these conditions, facilitating a virtual dialogue, and co-curating the experiences of urban citizens. Operating at two scales, this installation invites visitors to participate both in the gallery and throughout the city. In neighborhoods throughout San Francisco, hashtags will emerge, calling out the overlooked objects of our urban landscape: #curb, #drain, #crosswalk, #bench. These urban elements are often forgotten, but embedded within them are the stories of the city’s founding, its function, its values, and its potential future. The labeling of the ubiquitous will evolve in unexpected ways, examining the contentious, conflicted, and unexamined potentials of the city: #privatelyownedpublicspace, #googlebus, #homeless, #NoSitLie, #drought, #SeaLevelRise. Within the gallery space, large-scale prints and touchscreens will reveal the images and experiences of the city, as recorded and evaluated by its local community.

Scenes From Firearm Safety Monitors, 0–160 Decibels
Gerardo Guerrero; Marcus Guttenpla;, Zoe Padgett; Jenny Rodenhouse
Cities around the world have installed gunshot detection sensors to automatically alert law enforcement in the event of a shooting. This new infrastructural “sense” was implemented to listen for occurrences of violence but questions remain as to how it could be misused, misinterpreted, or appropriated in the future. Scenes From Firearm Safety Monitors examines the collection and interpretation of city data through an installation that divides the city into decibel ranges (0–45dB, 45–100dB, and 100–160dB) and allows listeners to sift through sounds and gather information. Each listening booth accesses a decibel range from a remote microphone array located in San Francisco. The project offers listeners the opportunity to experience fragments of a scene anonymously. Each listener documents what they hear, creating a log of interpretations and speculations. Each log will constitute a live feed and comparative record of a “smart city” narrated through multiple lenses and interpretations.

kringla heimsins
Josh Tonies| joshtonies.com
Kringla Heimsins, literally translated to, pretzel world or the circle of the world seeks to redefine the city as a hyper-city, one unencumbered by city-state demarcations, with migratory citizens who define this vast commonwealth. This computational panorama is constructed from bank notes. Symbols of sovereignty are recoded by grouping forms and eroding the negative space of buildings and mountains, employing histograms, which reference global ecological conditions such as: tracing carbon emissions, acidification levels of oceans, Milankovitch cycles, energy policy spending and other contributing factors.

This computational panorama follows a randomized path based on eye movement and loops producing the illusion of a continuous image. It employs a Kinect camera. When a viewer approaches the projection, their view of the city responds relative to their position.

The Postcard Machine (Possibly from the Future)
Michelle Ott | michelleott.com
The Postcard Machine (Possibly from the Future) is one method to inspire written communication via old-fashioned means (write and send a postcard!) but also to create a venue, income stream, and audience all wrapped into one performance vending machine.

For the festival the Postcard Machine will be stocked with postcards utilizing the themes related to the IFTF’s Open City/Art City Festival: Shareability, Equity, Participation, Imagination, and Adaptability. Participants will be confronted by a human powered machine, which will require their input to operate. The hope is that people imagine the not-so-far-away future and interact with a machine as a reminder that open cities are built on, and because of, social aspects of city life.

Houslets: Mobile, Modular, Open-Source Building
Tim McCormick | houslets.com | @houslets

Houslets addresses the basic problem of making full-scale building easier, cheaper, more participatory, and more adaptable to changing needs/wishes and varied sites. We are prototyping systems for modular, portable, user-buildable structures and space use, drawing on many precedents such as mobile homes, shipping containers, “stick-built” housing, and kit or prefab homes. The approaches might serve many purposes, such as affordable housing, popup work/commercial/retail spaces, or structures for public space or events.

Maker House One is a prototype super-micro live/work space, using a single 8x8x8-foot Houslets module cube. These cubes/units are designed to be expanded or combined into larger units by joining additional modules. Visitors can view the cutaway structure, play with scale-model cubes to design larger units, try the user-adjustable roof which converts into skylight, and shift the interior platforms which raise and lower to convert space between bed, desk, and couch use.

The project aims to encourage imagining of new ways urban space can be designed, built, used, and inhabited by a wide range of users, inhabitants, nomads, and visitors. Unlike in most modern building practices, it encourages and facilitates participatory, ongoing, hands-on design and adaptation of buildings by the people who use them.

BioLab
Tracy Jacobs | funkyautomata.com
Open Bioengineering Lab aims to raise awareness of complex questions that modern science is grapples with, and also considers the possibility of a research lab that is inclusive and open to anyone. The exhibit will be a fun experience where visitors of all ages can exercise their imagination and be visually and intellectually charged!

Mining Mars Simulation
Canner Mefe | http://cannermefe.com | @swezlex
We need to get off planet! With fracking and mining in general, we are poisoning the earth, all to get the last few fossil fuels out of the ground. It would be best to move these mining ventures off planet and keep earth pristine and livable. Asteroid mining outposts will soon turn into cities. Engineers will go up to fix gear, biologists will go up to grow food, and artists will build floating museums using robotic chisels to carve sculptures out of asteroids. We can core out asteroids to live in, tap asteroids for water, and 3d print necessities with the metals we gather! Open City / Art City participants are invited to help brainstorm, draw up plans, and build an asteroid city made of magnets on a giant magnet board. There will be a demonstration of a small robotic arm that picks up ore off a model asteroid.

AboutTheCity
Patricia McKenna | aboutthecity.weebly.com | @AboutTheCitySF
AboutTheCity is an interactive mobile software application supporting new possibilities for people to meaningfully engage with the city, and with each other. AboutTheCity provides a space for people to share what they think, notice, and create (individually or collaboratively), generating open data in real time, for leveraging by everyone.

The Ephemeral Marvels Perfume Store
Catherine Young | www.apocalypse.cc | @catherineyoung
The Ephemeral Marvels Perfume Store (T.E.M.P.S., French for time or weather) is a perfume line set in the future when many things would have disappeared because of climate change. This first collection features eight scents: Coasts, Coffee, Eucalyptus, Hardwood Trees, Honey, Ice, Peanuts, and Wine. Participants are invited to smell these perfumes and share their memories of the scents with fellow participants. As climate change continues to impact cities, I intended to design a sensory and accessible experience for us to reflect on the things we could lose. Smell, with its relationships to memory, is visceral and instantaneous. I hope to initiate conversations among people about their memories with the scents and hopefully inspire them to prevent these from disappearing from the natural world and being turned into luxury perfumes.

T.E.M.P.S. is part of The Apocalypse Project, a creative platform on climate change and environmental futures.

Creative Determinants of Health Station
Jeremy Liu | Creative Ecology website | Creative Determinants of Health website | @jeremycliu
The Creative Determinants of Health Station addresses the growing dependency on technology as an all-encompassing interface with the world, a dependency predicated on utility over agency. The Creative Determinants of Health Station expresses our imagined future in a post-IoT (internet of things) and post-QS (quantified self) world where a revival of direct sensory awareness is resurgent and a sense of personal agency is proven to be the ultimate cure all.

Visitors to the Station will be invited to activate (with no log-in, registration or password required!) the innate sensor network of their own faculties, utilizing ways of knowing that cultivate a sense of agency. A personal sense of agency, along with inclusion and control, has been well-documented as social determinants of one’s health. This Station is a tool for cultivating a personal practice of Social Determinants of Health because they build on you, yourself, as the most powerful instrument of monitoring, measuring and researching your environment and surroundings and circumstances.

See more at IFTF

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Tim Roseborough, Digital Artist and Musician:

Tim Roseborough is a digital artist and musician. His artwork and exhibitions have been featured in numerous publications, including Art In America, ARTNews, San Francisco Chronicle, SF Arts Monthly, SF Examiner, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Roseborough has performed and exhibited his artwork nationally, including the 2010 ZERO1 Biennial, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Root Division, Artexpo New York, The Garage San Francisco, ARTWork SF, and the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Mr. Roseborough lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Black Spirituals

Black Spirituals is a collaboration between Zackary Watkins and Marshall Trammell, two soloists who have found a new platform for the intersection of tone-generating electronic technology and the heart-thumping technology of acoustic percussion. This duet features a new tradition in conversant, duo vernacular dynamics that sparked a revolution in our conceptions of space, stage, ritual, performance, geography, praxis, brotherhood, relationships, rockin’ out, and mor

Marlon Ingram Sagana

Principle at Studio MSI in the Bay Area, California. Mr. Ingram has designed, educated, and produced many client projects within the Art & Design industry for over 20 years. He has worked with corporations, non profit organizations, artist residencies, galleries, museums, and dot coms throughout the world. Marlon also developed many products from marketing to selling, created high school curriculum for ‘inner city’ youth, and produces mural works throughout San Francisco, Richmond, and Oakland.

Kilimanjaro Robbs: Hidden Genius Project

Kilimanjaro Robbs is a tireless advocate for the success of Black youth. The Kapor Center is fortunate to be partners with such a great program, The Hidden Genius Project.

Drew Bennett: Program Director, Facebook Artist in Residency Program

James Rojas: Place-It

James Rojas holds an MA in City Planning and an MS in Architecture Studies from MIT. He works as a city and transportation planner, and is the founder of the Latino Urban Forum, a non-profit dedicated to increasing awareness of planning and design issues facing low-income Latinos. He has written and lectured extensively about how culture and immigration are transforming the American front yard and landscape, and, through Place It!, has organized an impressive number of on-site model installations and interactive workshops.

eve Warnock : Multimedia Artist

eve Warnock is a multimedia artist who melds ancient techniques of art-making with modern technologies. She is a costume and set designer as well as a director for live performances and films. eve earned a BA in Arts and Humanities from The Ohio State University, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media program.

eve is co-creator of Queen Mae and the Bells, a modern opera troupe that integrated electronics and projection in costume and engineered instruments. She is the Director of S e e k a g o, a series of five experimental films that incorporates tactics of live performance with film techniques and new medias. She is also director of many multi-media, interactive performances pieces where the stage is not defined and the characters and the audience switch places: Speakers, Denizen, Seek, and H e r d are a few examples. Her work explores the boundaries of human and animal relationships, studying primitive natures as a way to reconnect humans with each other and to the animal kingdom.

Gene A. Felice II: HERD

Gene Felice is a recent graduate Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at UCSC. He is starting a new faculty position in Intermedia and New Media at the University of Maine for fall ’14 where he will be launching his Coaction Lab for arts and science collaborations with an ecological focus. He currently divides his research between: Art, Design & Education. This split allows him to develop balance between interactive art, living systems, and the latest available technology for new media. He has a hybrid practice at the intersection of nature and technology, developing symbiotically creative systems as arts/science research.

Kate Spacek: HERD

Kate Spacek is Creative Director at LUDIKA, where she designs unique collaborative art and game experiences that connect, educate, and inspire action. She combines 15 years in business operations, project management, group facilitation, and event production with passion-based proficiencies in personal development and creativity to do what she loves – collaborate with global change-makers to address social challenges in playful yet purposeful ways. Kate leverages the innately human qualities of art, play, and co-creation to spark new perspectives and innovate creative solutions.

Nathaniel Ober : HERD

Nathaniel Ober is a new media artist whose work crosses disciplines from installation and performance to video and sound. His interdisciplinary works examine concepts of human perception and natural phenomena, sound as vibration, time and space, and the finite versus the infinite. Working with multiple facets of technology, he creates immersive installations that intend to pervade the viewers senses. His current research is focused on astronomy and astrophysics, which deal with techniques of sonification and processes that attempt to expose our innate connection to the universe.

Vikram Chandra: Author, Novelist, Short Story Writer

Vikram Chandra has been called “that rare thing, a writer who is simultaneously a master story-teller and a master stylist” (The Spectator). Chandra’s bestselling novel,Sacred Games, is a sprawling tale of Mumbai’s phantasmagoric criminal underworld and the unforgettable figures who populate it. Chandra is also the author of a short-story collection, Love and Longing in Bombay, which The New York Times Book Review called “a considerable achievement, one in which the author marries his storytelling prowess to a profound understanding of India’s ageless and ever-changing society.” His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Chandra has also been honored with the David Higham Prize, the Eurasia Region Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and numerous other awards. The New York Times Book Review calls his newest book, Geek Sublime, a “tour de force…. An exquisite meditation on aesthetics, and meanwhile it is also part memoir, the story of a young man finding his way from India to the West and back, and from literature to programming and back.” A graduate of Pomona College and the University of Houston, Chandra lives in Mumbai and California, where he teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley.

Raquel Gutiérrez: In Community Program Manager, YBCA

Raquel Gutiérrez is the YBCA In Community Program Manager for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where she facilitates artists, community members, and partner organizations in producing artistic inquiry in community relevant collaborative environments in historically rich neighborhoods such as the Mission District and West Oakland. Originally from Los Angeles, Raquel has long been a writer, live performer, film actor, curator, publisher (Econo Textual Objects, established 2014), playwright, arts administrator, and cultural organizer. She writes on art, culture, music, film, performance and community building and creates original solo and ensemble performance compositions. Raquel earned her MA in Performance Studies from New York University in 2004. She has lived in 3 places in the 18 months of living in the Bay Area and wonders when she’ll have to move again.

Matt Sussman: Managing Editor of Reviews and Columns, Art Practical

Matt Sussman is an Oakland-based writer and Managing Editor of Reviews and Columns for Art Practical. Matt’s writing has also appeared in the SF Bay Guardian, Art in America, The Wire, BUTT Magazine, Flavorpill and KQED Arts. He also works at the Bay Area Video Coalition.

Charles Ward: Senior Director, External Affairs,YBCA

Charles Ward has more than 30 years of professional experience in both the public and private sectors. In his early career, he worked in Washington, D.C., first as Chief-of-Staff to Congressman Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley) and subsequently as a staff attorney for the Federal Communications Commission. Charles moved to the Bay Area with his wife in 1975 and joined the San Francisco law firm of Rohan & Stepanian where he practiced law, specializing in music industry clientele, until 1983. In that year he joined Times Mirror Cable Television, Inc. where he served as Vice President of National Marketing & Programming. In 1996 he began working for a fledgling nonprofit arts organization then known as the San Francisco Jazz Festival. As Director of Marketing and Corporate Sponsorships he helped to develop the strategy to re-brand the organization as SFJAZZ. From 2002 until 2005 when he joined YBCA, Charles was employed as Vice President of Institutional Advancement for Family Service Agency of San Francisco.

Jason Kelly Johnson: Founding Design Partner, Future Cities Lab

Jason Kelly Johnson, is a founding design partner of Future Cities Lab, an experimental design and research office based in San Francisco, California and Athens, Greece. Working in collaboration with his partner Nataly Gattegno, Jason has produced a range of award-winning projects exploring the intersections of design with advanced fabrication technologies, robotics, responsive building systems and public space. Mr. Johnson’s work has been published and exhibited worldwide. In 2012 the Hydramax project was exhibited at the SFMOMA and the Datagrove project was a featured installation in the Zero1 Art and Technology Biennial. Most recently he was awarded the 2011 Architectural League of New York Young Architects Prize, and the 2008-09 Oberdick Fellowship at the University of Michigan TCAUP, and the 2009 New York Prize Fellowship at the Van Alen Institute in New York City, and exhibited work at the 2009-10 Hong Kong / Shenzhen Biennale. He currently teaches at the California College of the Arts and leads workshops around the world, including the Architectural Association (AA) Global Summer Program Biodynamic Structures.

Jason served as the Conference Chair of the ACADIA 2012 Conference “Synthetic Digital Ecologies” held in San Francisco. He has also served as a consultant to the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. Jason Kelly Johnson (b. 1973) was born and raised in Canada. He received his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University in 2001, and his Bachelor of Science from the University of Virginia. While at Princeton Mr. Johnson was awarded a Butler Traveling Fellowship, a Princeton University Academic Fellowship, and the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Thesis Prize for design research. He was the guest editor of 306090, a journal of emergent architecture and design, distributed by the Princeton Architectural Press. He has previously worked with Polshek Partnership and Reiser+Umemoto Architects in New York City.

Mariah Rankine-Landers: Educator

Mariah Rankine-Landers is a former kindergarten and first-grade teacher of 10 years and classroom educator for 17 years. Rankine-Landers holds a BA in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz, a teaching credential from CSUS, and a MA in equity and social justice in education from SFSU. She now works for Alameda County Office of Education as the Director of the Integrated Learning Specialist Program supporting the goals of learning in and through the arts and creative inquiry. In addition, Rankine-Landers does educational consulting with organizations in the Bay Area. She is a resident and adoring fan of Oakland and it’s communities and envisions a world of critical thinkers who solve our urgent problems through creativity and collaboration.

Todd Elkin: Artist, Writer, Researcher, Activist, Educator

Todd Elkin was born in Rutland, Vermont and is a visual artist, writer, researcher, activist, and arts educator currently living in Oakland, CA. He has an extensive visual art background including work as a professional fine-art printmaker and as a freelance illustrator. He earned a BFA in interdisciplinary studies from the San Francisco Art Institute, a teaching credential from Cal State East Bay and a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Arts in Education program. He is currently the Fine Arts Department Chair and an Art teacher at Washington High School in Fremont, CA where his specialty is designing and delivering student-driven, art-centered trans-disciplinary curriculum and fostering cultures of critical thinking and reflection. Elkin is a Senior Faculty member of The Integrated Learning Specialist Program offered through the Alameda County Office of Education. For the past nine years Elkin has taught at the Project Zero Classroom and Future of Learning Summer Institutes at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As an educator, Elkin is motivated by issues of social justice and equity in matters of race, class, and gender and is committed to creating spaces for students to engage in relevant lines of inquiry about these and other important themes.

Ernest Jolly: Artist

Ernest Jolly’s work involves the re-contextualization of lived experience, of both the individual and the group, in comparison to environmental change in nature. Through sculptural forms and video/sound installation I’m pulling together these lived experiences into a hybridized practice. My most recent body of work explores the architectural entropy of failing urban environments in relation to stresses on nature such as erosion of coastal lands and the depopulation of honeybee hives. The works compares and contrast such natural phenomenon as Colony Collapse Disorder to the decline of the industrial city. The cities I’m most interested in are former auto and steel manufacturing towns in the mid-west. These cities whose economies have rest largely on heavy industry production have, within the past decade, experienced huge economic and population decline. This decline has left many cities abandoned, without a sustainable infrastructure and deteriorating architecture. Colony Collapse Disorder is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive abruptly disappear.There is no definitive answer for this disorder at this time. Some attribute the problem to biotic factors, environmental stress, and malnutrition. Others suggest that it’s not one single factor but many factors that are the cause. My work is both a meditation and a call to action in addressing the factors of urban industrial decline and disappearance of species in nature.

Stephanie Syjuco: Artist and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Visual Arts Fellow

STEPHANIE SYJUCO creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting a parasitic art counterfeiting event, “COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone” for Frieze Projects, London (2009); and “Shadowshop,” an alternative vending outlet embedded at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work (2010-11). She is currently collaborating with the FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists in Genk, Belgium, on a new body of works utilizing 3-D scanning of Belgian and Congolese antiquities to produce hybrid ceramic objects addressing the legacy of colonialism, empire, and trade routes.

Born in the Philippines, she received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and included in exhibitions at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, Germany; Z33 Space for Contemporary Art, Belgium; UniversalStudios Gallery Beijing; The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. In 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops in Istanbul and in 2009 contributed proxy sculptures for MOMA/P.S.1’s joint exhibition, “1969.” Recently, she has expanded into the curatorial field with the exhibition “Lossy” at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and has essays included in the forthcoming Journal for Design Strategies published by Parsons The New School and within a book on alternative art education to be published by Phaidon.

A long-time educator, she has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, The San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, Carnegie Mellon University, and most recently joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in January 2014 as an Assistant Professor in Sculpture. At Berkeley she is working to expand a conceptual and materials-based pedagogy, combining methods of the handcrafted with digital technologies and social engagement in order to speak of the frictions within late-capitalist society. She currently serves on the Board of Directors at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and lives and works in San Francisco.

Christine Wong Yap: Artist

Born in California, Christine Wong Yap holds a BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in New York, Los Angeles, Manila, Osaka, London, Newcastle, and Manchester (U.K.). Recent exhibitions include Happiness Is… (Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA), Irrational Exuberance (Asst. Colors) (Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, UK) and Art Moves billboard festival (Toruń, Poland). Reviews of her work have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Art Practical.

She has participated in residencies at Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester, U.K.), Tides Institute and Museum of Art (Eastport, ME), Woodstock Byrdcliffe (Woodstock, NY), and Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA), as well as the Affiliate Artist program at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA).

In addition to a forthcoming grant from the Queens Council on the Arts, she has received funding from the Jerome Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts.

A longtime resident of Oakland, CA, she relocated to New York, NY in 2010.

Favianna Rodriguez: Artist

Favianna Rodriguez is a celebrated printmaker and digital artist based in Oakland, California. Using high-contrast colors and vivid figures, her composites reflect literal and imaginative migration, global community, and interdependence. Whether her subjects are immigrant day laborers in the U.S., mothers of disappeared women in Juárez, Mexico, or her own abstract self portraits, Rodriguez brings new audiences into the art world by refocusing the cultural lens. Through her work we witness the changing U.S. metropolis and a new diaspora in the arts.

Institute for the Future

IFTF brings people together to make the future—today. Whether you’re a strategic leader in a large organization or a community leader in a struggling neighborhood or a netizen who wants to mobilize global crowds, we have practical tools, research, and programs that turn foresight into the critical new insights that ultimately lead to action.

As an independent, non-profit research organization with a 45-year track record of helping all kinds of organizations make the futures they want, IFTF’s core research staff and creative design studio work together to provide practical foresight for a world undergoing rapid change.

IFTF has pioneered tools and methods for building foresight ever since its founding days. Co-founder Olaf Helmer was the inventor of the Delphi Method, and early projects developed cross-impact analysis and scenario tools. Today, IFTF is methodologically agnostic, with a brimming toolkit of foresight methodologies.

Rebecca Foster: Senior Advisor, San Francisco Office of Mayor Edwin Lee.

Rebecca is currently a Senior Advisor for the San Francisco Office of Mayor Edwin Lee. She is leading the City’s exploration of social impact bonds and building capital tools to address the City’s workforce housing shortage. She previously worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for eight years, where she raised over $13 billion in capital for local governments, universities, non-profits, and utilities working in the New York and San Francisco offices. In 2008, Rebecca served as the chief of staff for her department, managing changes to the business’s structure and strategy around the financial crisis. Prior to Goldman, Rebecca worked in urban development consulting at HR&A Advisors, the White House OMB, and as a river guide. She received her B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Brown and her MBA from Stanford. Rebecca is a board member of the Mission Preparatory School, a K-8 charter school, and ARTA, a whitewater rafting organization.

JD Beltran: Conceptual Artist, Filmmaker, Writer, Educator, and Public Art Administrator.

JD Beltran’s award-winning work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Center, The Kitchen in New York, the MIT Media Lab, and Cité des Ondes Vidéo et Art Électronique in Montreal. She is an expert in public art, having been appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission since 2009 (and serving as its President since 2012), and having authored the Master Public Art Plan for the Yerba Buena Downtown Arts District in 2014. She also has been commissioned to create her own public art projects in San Francisco, San Jose, Cleveland, Ohio, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; her 2009 public art project for the City of San Jose was deemed one of the top public art projects in the country for 2009. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine, as well as in Art in America, ArtNews, the New Art Examiner, Art Practical, and Art Papers. She also has received awards such as an Artadia Grant, a Workshop Residence Grant, a Stochastic Labs Grant and residency, a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Fellowship, as well as residencies at the Skowhegan School, the Pilchuck School (Hauberg Fellowship), the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Montalvo Arts Center. She has written columns on art and culture for both SFGate.com and the Huffington Post, and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Beltran is also faculty in the Film, New Genres, and Design & Technology Programs of the San Francisco Art Institute, where she also directs the school’s City Studio arts education program for under-served youth. She is also Adjunct Faculty in Graduate Design at the California College of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Neil Hrushowy, PhD, MS, Manager, City Design Group, Citywide Planning

Neil Hrushowy is the manager of the City Design Group in the San Francisco Planning Department. The City Design Group provides urban design services for the City of San Francisco, combining the disciplines of city planning, architecture and landscape architecture. Its responsibilities include placemaking, design review, design innovation, urban design policy, and research, with a portfolio that ranges from the micro-scale of the parklet to the neighborhood-wide scale of a public realm plan. Current projects include the redesign of Castro Street, Jefferson Street and Mission Street; public realm plans for Haight-Ashbury and the Dog Patch Neighborhood; and the installation of temporary plazas on Annie Alley and Persia Triangle. Throughout its work, the City Design Group emphasizes a human-focused design that builds upon how people perceive and use public space, while taking advantage of San Francisco’s spectacular natural setting. This philosophy extends to both the public realm and the design of buildings that frame it.

Patrick Lotilla: DJ

Jova Vargas: Youth Arts Manager, YBCA

Jova Vargas is a multimedia artist and educator. Jovas work is rooted in capturing genealogies of race and identity through the cultivation of shared histories in public space. After graduating Hampshire College with a BA in Film/Video and Education, Jova’s career as a film/video editor and background in community organizing led her to several youth arts teaching positions. Jova is excited to be YBCA’s Youth Arts Manager after holding the position of Youth Arts Program Assistant since 2012.

Lina Sheth, VP for Strategy and Operations, ZeroDivide

Lina Sheth brings over 25 years of executive leadership experience working in community to improve health outcomes for communities of color to shape her approach to the work. Prior to coming to ZeroDivide, she led a national and regional capacity building assistance program for over 12 years enabling nonprofits, local and state governments and community leaders to maximize their potential to achieve their mission. With A&PI Wellness Center, she worked to align HIV and health programs through strategy and change management in a primary care clinic in the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco. During her tenure, she worked to link innovative technological solutions to the most underserved communities to promote health and wellness and integrate clinical care coordination. She is a certified leadership coach that believes the power of leadership drives creative solutions to further social justice innovation. She earned both her M.P.H. and a B.S. in Physical Therapy from Boston University.

DJ Uni aka Cynthia Blancaflor

Cynthia Blancaflor is an award-winning Filipina American filmmaker and musician. As DJ Uni, she hosted “Her Blu Majesty” on Peralta Colleges,’9thfloorradio.com, from 2008-2013. She created Rising Star Productions, a full service video production company in 2007, serving clients across sectors, making a positive impact on our communities.

Rising Star Productions: http://rising-star.net

DJ Uni’s Music and Mixes: https://soundcloud.com/dj-uni-vibes

“Her Blu Majesty with DJ Uni” on Peralta Colleges Radio: http://www.9thfloorradio.com/herblumajesty

Tom DeCaigny: Director of Cultural Affairs, San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC)

Before coming to the Arts Commission, Tom DeCaigny was an independent consultant, strategist and facilitator with over fifteen years of leadership experience in the fields of arts and culture, youth development and education. He has worked nationally on projects related to program evaluation and improvement, policy development, fundraising strategy, governance and organizational innovation. He founded Canopy Consulting in 2010 and was also a Senior Consultant with The Improve Group based in Minnesota. Mr. DeCaigny previously served nine years as Executive Director of Performing Arts Workshop, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to helping marginalized young people develop critical thinking, creative expression and basic learning skills through the arts. While at The Workshop, he led three U.S. Department of Education research projects examining the impact of the arts on educationally disadvantaged youth; organized broad-based coalitions to advocate at the local, state and national levels for the role of the arts in improving public education; and managed the sustained growth of the Workshop’s annual revenue despite the economic downturn—from $529K in FY 2003 to $1.4 million in FY 2011. He has presented extensively on promising practices in program and organizational management as well as on intergenerational and emergent leadership in the independent sector.

He currently serves on the California Alliance for Arts Education’s Board of Directors and statewide Policy Council. His prior board service includes two terms as Board Co-Chair of LYRIC, an LGBTQQ youth community center in San Francisco; Secretary of the SFUSD Arts Education Master Plan Advisory Committee; Host Committee Co-Chair of the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s 2010 annual conference in San Francisco; and Steering Committee Chair for Making Art, Making Change, a 2006 conference dedicated to examining the relationship between art and social change. Mr. DeCaigny has a B.A. degree in Dramatic Arts from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and currently resides in San Francisco, CA.

Tina Chang: AICP, LEED AP, San Francisco Planning Department

Tina is an urban designer/ planner at the San Francisco Planning Department where she splits her time between the project management of development reviews in the Current Planning Division and working with the City Design Group on projects focused around temporary urbanism. She is currently leading the community engagement and evaluation components of the Market Street Prototyping Festival. Tina draws upon her urban design and master planning experience in the public and private sectors working on projects throughout California, Washington, D.C., Asia and the Middle East. She holds a Masters in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts in International Development from the University of California Los Angeles.

Gabriel Medina: Policy Manager at the Mission Economic Development Agency

Gabriel Medina is the Policy Manager at the Mission Economic Development Agency, where he leads MEDA’s involvement in policy issues and advocacy to support the economic and academic success of San Francisco’s low- and moderate-income Latino community. MEDA serves more than 5,000 clients annually through business development, financial education, workforce development, tax preparation, foreclosure intervention, and homeownership counseling. MEDA is also the lead for the Mission Promise Neighborhood, which is building a cradle-to career continuum of services in the Mission District.

Prior to MEDA, Gabriel worked for the California State Assembly as a District Representative for Assemblymember Dickinson where he planned public-private partnership, community benefit events such as Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA), “Cash for College” FAFSA (Cal-SOAP) and Financial Literacy, responded to constituent concerns, and guided policy analysis and decision making processes around issue areas that included small business, labor, technology, environmental and housing concerns

Before this, Gabriel managed or directed several successful campaigns, including that of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, with Medina serving as Field Director. Also, Medina was the Sales and Marketing Director for four years of Verican.com, a global San Francisco startup serving the newspaper industry.

Gabriel is a native of San Francisco and attended SFUSD schools as well as UC Berkeley, where he studied Political Science and City Planning. He is a member of the University of California San Francisco’s Community Advisory Group, Board member of the Mission YMCA, Board member of the San Francisco Latino Voter Project, Appointments Chair for the Chicano Latino Caucus of the California Democratic Party and President of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club.

Kara Q. Smith: Independent Writer and Curator

Kara Q. Smith is an independent writer and curator living in San Francisco. She has worked with numerous arts and cultural organizations in both Alabama and California. Influenced equally by Jane Jacobs, Lucy Lippard and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, her work explores the role art can play in facilitating community, interacting with urban spaces, and creating poetic dissidence. She is a recipient of SOMArts Cultural Center’s Commons Curatorial Residency, along with co-curator Laura Poppiti, for their July 2012 exhibition Performing Community. Kara currently serves as the Managing Editor of Art Practical and is a regular contributor to ArtSlant. She holds a BA in Art History from Birmingham-Southern College and an MA in Urban Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Nkeiruka Oruche: Dance and Music Facilitator, the Afro-Urban Dance Experience

Nkeiruka Oruche is a dance and music facilitator, creator and performer who specializes in street dance styles from Africa and her Diaspora. With over 15 years of experience, her goal is to use dance as a way for people to lead healthy lives and create positive change in their community. She offers private and small group classes, residences and workshops, for individual growth, team building, community movements or just for fun. Currently she serves as Director of D-fuse Afro-urban dance group and Co-Founder of BoomShake, a multicultural music and dance program for all ages. Nkei is of Nigerian of Igbo descent and currently lives and plays in Oakland, California.

Andy Puls: Composer, Musician, Audio Engineer

Andy Puls is a composer, musician, audio engineer, inventor, and video artist living in the East SF Bay, CA. He records music under the names A Magic Whistle and Chilly William. You can find out more about his various projects at: www.videopaws.com

Raw-G: Gina Madrid, Rapper, Musician

From a young age, Raw-G began writing and rapping to express her personal experience as a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico. Tupac Shakur, KRS-1 and The Fugees inspired her to learn English, and now, repping Mexico in Oakland (and worldwide), Raw-G prefers to flow in Mexican Spanish, finding audience within the large Spanish-speaking population of the Americas. (No doubt, Raw-G’s individual tone, rhythm, and sound speaks to everyone, regardless of any language barrier!)

As an advocate for women artists everywhere, this uber talented bi-lingual MC features regularly on panels and discussions that both celebrate and help define the role of the female in music, art, and community. Case in point was her presence at this year’s “Women In Hip Hop & Creative Arts” panel that took place at the Rock the School Bells Hip Hop Conference in March.

But the Bay Area is her stomping ground, and she’s shared the stage with globally recognized artists like the Ladies First Collective, Camp-Lo, Too Short, Ozomatli, Mobb Deep, KRS-1, Pharoahe Monch, Immortal Technique, and Dj Leydis. She’s scheduled to perform soon with French-Chilean revolutionary rapper, Ana Tijoux, whose been ripping up the mic for more than 10-years now!” - excerpt from World Hip Hop Market

Noah Weinstein: Senior Creative Programs Manager, Instructables; Autodesk Artist Residency

Noah (noahw) Weinstein is the Senior Creative Programs Manager for Autodesk. He founded, and now runs the Artist in Residence Program, Creative Programs Department, and Workshop at Pier 9. Before creating Pier 9, Noah worked in the community management, editorial and content production departments of Instructables.com. He tries to get away at least some part of every year to explore interesting projects as the Director of SF Media Labs, or the Wild and Scenic rivers of the west as a professional white water rafting guide. His passion is to gather expansive social and physical resources in a squirrel like manner to create an environment where diverse communities of artists, makers and engineers can explore, research, and bring their dreams to life.

Dorothy Santos: Independent Writer

Dorothy is a writer whose research areas include computational aesthetics, programming, coding, open source culture and their effects on contemporary art. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco, and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She currently serves as an editor for the New Asterisk magazine and The Civic Beat. Her work appears in Hyperallergic, Art21, Art Practical, Creative Applications Network, Daily Serving, Planting Rice, and Stretcher. She has lectured and spoken at the de Young Museum, San Francisco Art Institute, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ZERO1: The Art and Technology Network. She also serves as a board member for the SOMArts Cultural Center.

Danielle Siembieda-Gribben: Art Practitioner creating works in the intersection of technology and the environment

Danielle Siembieda-Gribben is an art service provider and creative entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works at the intersection of Social Practice, Institutional Critique, Intervention and New Media. Most of her work includes an emphasis on the environment and technology. Her most recent project, “The Art Inspector” began in 2009 as a method to reduce the carbon footprint of art. This project has been funded Silicon Valley Energy Watch to conduct energy assessments on artist studios and take them through an eco-art makeover. She has been an artist in residence at the TechShop SJ where she create a body of work around cyborg politics and the anthropocene. Some of her other roles include being a board member of the Women’s Environmental Art Director; art consultant to the San Francisco Department of the Environment, and outreach coordinator for CODAME Art + Tech. Siembieda has a MFA in Digital Media Art at San Jose State University at the CADRE Laboratory for New Media with a focus on green technologies, sustainable materials.

Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im: Writers, Curators

Aaron Harbour is a curator, writer, and artist operating out of Oakland, CA. He is co-director of Et al., a gallery program in San Francisco, and has additionally curated exhibitions at a variety of venues throughout the Bay Area, and at art fairs in New York, Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles. He has written for Curiously Direct, Fillip Magazine, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Art Practical, and others. His work has been exhibited at CCA Wattis Institute, City Limits and Southern Exposure.

Jackie Im is a curator and writer based in Oakland, CA. She has contributed to exhibitions at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, the Walter and McBean Galleries at SFAI, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queens Nails, the Mills College Art Museum, and MacArthur B Arthur. She hold a BA in Art History from Mills College and a MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. She is currently the co-director of Et al., a gallery in San Francisco’s Chinatown with Facundo Argañaraz and Aaron Harbour.

Michael Widner: Academic Technology Specialist for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University

Michael Widner works for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and the Stanford University Libraries, where his job title is Academic Technology Specialist. He consults and collaborates with faculty and their research assistants on DLCL-based digital humanities and instructional technology projects. He also helps organize and present events for the Digital Humanities Focal Group. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. He is also the Director of Technology for Lacuna Stories, a digital research and teaching platform that emphasizes close reading, annotation, and connected learning.

Tom Comitta: Writer, Multimedia Artist

Tom Comitta is the author of ? (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2013) and SENT (Invisible Venue, 2014). Since 2011 he has published multimedia text-based art and writing by over 30 artists at calmaplombprombombbalm.com. From 2011-12, he co-composed and co-conducted nine operas with The San Francisco Guerrilla Opera Company, a roving sound poetry troupe that gave voice to street signs and leaked US embassy cables. One opera, Canyouhearmenow?, was covered by the Associated Press and USA Today, contributing to national debates over censorship in the digital age. Currently Comitta is a book designer and a facilitator of writing workshops at elementary schools. In 2015, Gauss PDF will release Collected Books: 2011-2104, an offering of the 42 books Comitta composed over four years

David E. Thigpen: Institute for the Future and UC Berkeley

David E. Thigpen is a culture critic and public policy analyst who works as a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future, and as a Lecturer in the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where he teaches narrative writing. David’s most recent area of research is creative place-making in American cities. http://www.iftf.org/davidthigpen/

Tomas McCabe: Executive Director, Black Rock Arts Foundation

As the Executive Director of the Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF), Tomas McCabe maintains the Foundation’s endeavor to serve the public by providing collaborative, original and accessible art experiences. BRAF’s projects challenge current expectations of public art, and realize the community-building potential of collaborative creative process. McCabe leverages his background in the visual arts and environmental sustainability to further BRAF’s mission to support and promote community-based and civic-engaging art.

Dorka Keehn: Artist, Public Art Consultant, Author and Arts Commissioner

Dorka Keehn is an award winning artist and the Principal of Keehn On Art, a public art advisory. She led the fundraising effort for Leo Villareal’s The Bay Lights, an $8M light installation for the Bay Bridge. Dorka is also a SF Arts Commissioner serving as chair of the Visual Arts Committee and on the Civic Design Review Committee.

Chris Treggiari: Artist

Chris Treggiari’s artistic practice strives to investigate how art can penetrate the public realm in a way that can connect wide ranges of people and neighborhoods in a variety of communities. Chris has shown throughout the Bay Area including the SOMArts, Southern Exposure, Queens Nails Annex and the ZERO1 Biennial in San Jose. Chris has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Creative Work Fund, the Arts Commission of San Jose and the Cultural Center for Innovation (in collaboration with Sergio De La Torre). His work has been reviewed in such publications as Art Ltd, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Mission Local to name a few.

Anthony Discenza : Artist

Anthony Discenza received his Masters in Film and Video from California College of the Arts and his Bachelors in Studio Art from Wesleyan University. His work is directed by a preoccupation with interrupting the flow of information in various formats. While his work has been primarily video-based, it has also taken the form of other mediums such as text, imagery, and computer generated sound.

Discenza’s work has been presented widely around the United States and globally, including with the San Francisco Arts Commission, the United Nations Pavilion in Shanghai, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty Center and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. His work has garnered critical acclaim in Artforum, Artweek, and ArtReview, among other publications.

In 2012 he received the Alumni New Works Award from Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California. This year Discenza’s work was featured in the group show “The Modern Monster” at Queen’s Nails, San Francisco, California. Discenza lives and works in Oakland, California and had his first exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery in 2004.

Robin Espinoza: Artist, In Community YAAW Alumni Fellow (ICYAF)

Robin Espinoza is visual artist born and raised in San Francisco, California. He is a 2013 graduate from YBCAs Young Artist At Work (YAAW) program and a current In Community YAAW Alumni Fellow (ICYAF). He notes, “The art I create speaks to social justice and culture–topics I am most passionate about, my art is also deeply influenced by urban street art, tattoos, music, cartoons, and comic books. I am excited about being a ICYAF this year, and also stoked to be creating art while collaborating with other organizations.”

Halcyonaire

Halcyonaire has come to be defined by their unique brand of experimental Americana that balances a poetic brand of country music with a particularly Californian take on folk-rock. Their pioneering spirit doesn’t stop there, Halcyonaire recently made an expedition to the Northeast reaches of the Sonoran Desert to produce field recordings for their recent single, “Star Eyes.” This new experiment in ecological creativity, SOUNDINGS, has established a precedent for immersing listeners in the geographies that inspire their music. Be on the lookout for their new album in November.

http://soundingssession.com/

Carey Lin: artist/curator; Co-Director of Stairwell’s, Co-Director of Royal NoneSuch Gallery, Assistant Director of Southern Exposure

Carey Lin is a San Francisco-based visual artist and curator. By day she is the Assistant Director at Southern Exposure and on nights and weekends she co-directs Oakland’s not-for-profit Royal NoneSuch Gallery as well as Stairwell’s, a roving curatorial project with programs and exhibitions throughout the Bay Area. Carey earned her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago and also served as a Visiting Lecturer at UChicago’s Department of Visual Arts. She has attended artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and Ox-Bow (Saugatuck, MI). Her work has been exhibited at Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland), Martina }{ Johnston Gallery (Berkeley), Tartine Bakery (SF), Macarthur B Arthur Gallery (Oakland), Truesilver Gallery (SF), the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Samsøn Projects (Boston), and DOVA Temporary (Chicago). In her spare time, Carey makes ceramic “glazed” donuts at the Randall Museum.

Deena Chalabi: Associate Curator of Public Practice, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Deena Chalabi joined the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as Associate Curator of Public Practice in January 2014. From 2009 to 2012 she was the founding Head of Strategy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition of Mathaf’s permanent collection and was responsible for developing the museum’s public presence across several platforms. She created the ‘Pop-Up Mathaf’ program for collaborative international partnerships, curating Interference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in July 2011. She guest curated three additional Pop-Up Mathaf programs, partnering with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2012 and with the Serpentine Galleries and the Liverpool Biennial in 2013. She has written for Bidoun, ArtAsiaPacific, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. Deena received her BA in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Masters from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Melorra Green: Curator for Inquiry and Impact, SOMArts Cultural Center

Melorra Green, M.A.Edm is a curator, artist, radio show host, and community activist. She is a native of Memphis, TN and has called San Francisco home for 14 years. A graduate of Tennessee State University in Nashville, the Academy of Art University where she received her Bachelors of Arts in Motion Pictures & Television, and the University of Phoenix where she received a Masters of Arts in Education. Before joining SOMArts, she was the Visual Arts Coordinator for the African American Art & Culture Complex in San Francisco. In addition to serving as the Curator for Inquiry and Impact at SOMArts, she is also a member of the Arts Providers Alliance of San Francisco Executive Committee and the San Francisco Graffiti Advisory Board.

Along with her twin sister, Melonie Green, Melorra has been curating creative art experiences and traditional exhibitions for over seven years. Together they have a niche and love for bringing worlds of obscurity together to create a beautiful cohesive message that leaves the viewer feeling inspired and included and the creator feeling empowered and appreciated.

Eliza Barrios: YBCA In Community Lead Artist (SOMA)

Eliza O. Barrios is a multidisciplinary artist. Her work ranges from installation, performative to new media art which draws from her background as a queer american filipina. Barrios is inspired by her fervent curiosity of how ephemeral space is perceived in relation to systems of belief. Barrios’ work has been exhibited at museums, film festivals, and new media festivals internationally and domestically, including the Optica Festival (Gijón, Spain), New Forms Festival (Vancouver, Canada), International Turin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Oahu, Hawaii) and Mag:Net: Gallery – Katinpunan (Manila, Philippines). Barrios holds a B.A. from San Francisco State University and an M.F.A. from Mills College. She has received an Honorary Fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Barrios is also a member of Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. have been scheming, entertaining and creating together for more than 10 years. Their work ranges from video, performative to public art. Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. have shown in various musuems, galleries and film festivals including the DeYoung Museum (San Francisco, CA), the Mix Festival (New York, NY), SF International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (San Francisco CA) and the Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco, CA).

Matana Roberts: dynamic saxophonist, composer, improviser, and mixed media sound conceptualist

Photo credit: Evan Hunter McKnight

Internationally documented, Chicago-born, New York City-based sound experimentalist Matana (m(a)-ta-na\) Roberts, works in many performance/sound mediums including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. A dynamic saxophonist, composer, improviser, and mixed media sound conceptualist, she aims to expose the mystical roots and the intuitive spirit raising traditions of American creative expression in her music and art. Her innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, and political expression within improvisatory structures.

Ebony McKinny: Director, Emerging Arts Professionals SF

Ebony McKinney has a diverse range of experience in non-profit, philanthropic and government organizations. McKinney served as the founding director of Emerging Arts Professionals/SFBA, a network focused on the empowerment, leadership, and growth of next generation arts and culture workers in the San Francisco Bay Area and was instrumental in helping to establish the statewide California NextGen Arts Leadership Initiative funded by The James Irvine Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She has held positions with Intersection for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has also sat on the Emerging Leader Council of Americans for the Arts. McKinney has participated in grant review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Oakland Cultural Affairs Commission and currently serves on the on the Citizen’s Advisory Committee of Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Ebony holds a BA in Communications from Chatham College and MA’s in both Cultural Entrepreneurship and Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London. McKinney also attended the International Summer School in Cultural Economics in Amsterdam (NL).

Shawn Lani: Senior Artist and Curator of the Exploratorium

Shawn Lani is a senior artist and curator of the Exploratorium’s Outdoor Gallery and other outdoor works. His Outdoor team is creating more than twenty-five site-specific installations and commissioning a wide range of artists to help enrich and enliven the museum’s new home at Pier 15. In addition to their work at the piers, the Outdoor team is actively developing and installing public works throughout the Bay Area. As principal investigator for the NSF-funded project Ciencia Publica, Shawn is leading the development of portable and public interactions in predominantly Latino neighborhoods, working in partnership with San Francisco city planners and advocates for urban improvements. Shawn has also created pieces for the NSF-fundedOutdoor Exploratorium: Experiments in Noticing. The project team installed twenty outdoor pieces at Fort Mason, a unique urban national park in San Francisco. In addition, as a member of the NOAA/Exploratorium Vision Council, Shawn advocates for artworks that create intimate experiences with broad implications.

An active public artist, Shawn has participated in a number of national and international artist-in-residencies. His creations are installed in more than fifty museums worldwide, and he is the recipient of a National American Institute of Architects award for the monumental LIGO Wind Wall installation in Livingston, Louisiana.

Shawn has a BA in English/Creative Writing & Art History from the University of California at Davis, and an MA in Museum Studies (Design and Education) from John F. Kennedy University.

Colleen Wilson: Executive Director, Interactive, KQED

As KQED Interactive Executive Director, Colleen Wilson oversees one of the nation’s most trafficked public broadcasting station sites including KQEDnews.org. Key services include a multiplatform regional news service, daily blogs on the local arts and food scenes, broadcast and direct-to-online video and audio podcasts, mobile and Facebook apps. Some of the recognition KQED Interactive has received during her tenure is the Pew Center Batten Award, Online Journalism Award from ONA & USC Annenberg, Knight Environmental Journalism Innovator of the Year and Japan Prize grand finalist. Wilson also serves on the PBS Producers Advisory Panel and is a regular speaker on mobile trends at conferences such as the Integrated Media Association. Internationally, Wilson served as a judge of the Innovative Media Category for the 2011 and 2012 Japan Prize competition.

@colleenwilson

Zachary Norris: Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Zachary Norris is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and a former director of our Books Not Bars campaign. Prior to rejoining the organization, Zachary founded and co-directed Justice for Families, a national alliance of family-driven organizations working to end our nation’s youth incarceration epidemic.

During the seven years he led the campaign, Books Not Bars built California’s first statewide network for families of incarcerated youth, led the effort to close five youth prisons in the state, passed legislation to enable families to stay in contact with their loved ones, and defeated Prop 6—a destructive and ineffective criminal justice ballot measure.

In addition to being a Harvard graduate and NYU-educated attorney, Zachary is also a graduate of the Labor Community Strategy Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing in Los Angeles, California and was a 2011 Soros Justice Fellow. He is a former board member at Witness for Peace and Just Cause Oakland and is currently serving on the Justice for Families board.

Zachary is a loving husband and dedicated father of two bright daughters, whom he is raising in his hometown of Oakland, California.

Click here to contact Zachary or schedule a meeting with him.

Saru Jayaraman: Co-founder and Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United)

As a co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United), Saru Jayaraman is dedicated to improving wages and working conditions for the over ten million restaurant workers in the United States. She helped to create the organization in the aftermath of the Sept. 11th attacks, together with displaced workers from Windows on the World, the restaurant that topped the World Trade Center. Since then, the group has launched several workplace justice campaigns, conducted research and policy work, partnered with responsible restaurants and launched several cooperatively-owned restaurants. The work of ROC, which now boasts 10,000 members in almost 20 cities nationwide, is chronicled in the book The Accidental American.

Jayaraman, who is also Director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkley, has been profiled in The New York Times, was named one of Crain’s “40 under 40” and listed as one of New York Magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City.

She is a co-editor of The New Urban Immigrant Workforce and the author of the recently released, Behind the Kitchen Door, an exposé of the invisible restaurant labor force. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.