Season 5: September 2018–March 2019
September 27, 2018
Dorothy R. Santos, Captain Video: The Last of the Small Screen Heroes
Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, editor, and curator whose research interests include digital art, computational media, and biotechnology. 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 is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA's Open Space. Her essay "Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings," was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH and works as the Program Manager for the Processing Foundation.
Tanya Zimbardo, Tribal Vision: West Coast Video Vanning
Tanya Zimbardo is a San Francisco native and contemporary art curator. A primary emphasis of her research and writing is the history of experimental media and site-oriented artworks in California. As the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she has organized several solo and group exhibitions. She contributed to SFMOMA's Open Space the series "Receipt of Delivery," which featured select Bay Area exhibition mailers from the SFMOMA Research Library's unprocessed collection of artists' ephemera. Zimbardo has guest curated exhibitions, screenings, and conversations for nonprofit arts organizations including the 500 Capp Street Foundation, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco Cinematheque, and Artists' Television Access, among others. Co-edited exhibition catalogues include "Soundtracks" (SFMOMA) and "Public Works: Artists' Interventions: 1970s-Now" (Mills College Art Museum).
October 18, 2018
Liat Berdugo, A SITUATION: A Tree in Palestine
Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator whose work—which focuses on embodiment and digitality, archive theory, and new economies—interweaves video, writing, performance, and computer programming to form a considerate and critical lens on digital culture. Berdugo has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, and she collaborates widely with individuals and archives. She is the co-founder and curator of the Bay Area's Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art salon; co-founder and curator of World Wide West, an annual summit, exhibit, and performative new media event, among others. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life magazine, and others, and her book, The Everyday Maths, was published by Anomalous Press in 2013. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.
Isa Knafo and Lane Goldszer, In the Badlands: A Meeting Place of Manifest Destiny and Proto-Fascism
Lane Goldszer is a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, they work in general collections and the Hormel LGBTQIA center. They have studied fine art, and spend time agitating against capitalism. Some of Lane's places include; Southeast Michigan where they were born, East Germany where they learned how to cook sour eggs, Baltimore Maryland where they lived in collective houses, and Los Angeles, a place where they lived for five years but barely scratched the surface.
Isa Knafo is a researcher and filmmaker. She makes films about contemporary and historic American systems of land expropriation and extraction. Her work includes a documentary on a rare earth mine in the Mojave desert, and shorter non-fiction films on gold hunting, beaver trapping, and other fusions of myth and commodity fetish that fueled the growth and expansion of American hegemony. She also works with anti-gentrification groups in Los Angeles and the Bay.
November 15, 2018
Lisa Martin, In Search of George Bonnell: Constructing Memories of 1970s Gay L.A.
Lisa Martin is an artist, writer, and arts administrator with a not-so-secret passion for experimental archives and an interest in the production and display of site-specific art in cultural heritage sites. You can make her day by taking her to any place with an explanatory plaque.
Elena Harvey Collins, Alive in the Archive: Fresno's Radical Imagination
Elena Harvey Collins is a British curator, writer and artist, based in Fresno, CA, where she organizes the programming for Fresno City College's Art Space Gallery. Her recent curatorial and writing projects include "Thickets," a group exhibition about the legacy of feminist art in Fresno, and "Sculptures and People," a photo series and essay about the redevelopment of the Fulton Mall in downtown Fresno.
January 17, 2019
Caitlyn Galloway, Dahlias Live Among Us
Caitlyn Galloway is an artist and (currently nonpracticing) farmer. She was the co-founder of Little City Gardens, a working urban farm in San Francisco from 2010–2016. She is a Bay Area native who still loves San Francisco very much, despite itself, and finds most of her inspiration in the corners of the city that are still dirty. She works as a designer and trained sign painter.
Elisabeth Nicula, Tidewater
Elisabeth Nicula is an interdisciplinary artist from Norfolk, Virginia. Her work is in conversation with nature: she is interested in the sense of place engendered by landscapes; in observing and depicting the natural world via abstracted scales of space and time; and in poetics and memory. Her artworks serve as secondary sources for looking at the non-human world, to awaken in viewers the desire to look first-hand. Elisabeth works and walks in San Francisco.
February 14, 2019
Jenny Odell, Excavating Calabazas Creek: An Inefficient Trip Through Silicon Valley
Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based writer and visual artist who grew up in Cupertino. Most of her work is an argument for close observation, especially of one's physical environment. She is currently working on getting better at doing nothing.
Livia Foldes, The Haunted Cloud: Imagined Technological Landscapes and the Ghosts in the the Machine
Livia Foldes works somewhere between art and design. Her work is characterized by an intense engagement with and curiosity about visual culture, a critical perspective, and an affinity for language, research and technology.
March 14, 2019
Amy Berkowitz, The Orange: Mythologizing Place and Holding Space
Born in New York City, Amy Berkowitz moved west for grad school (Ann Arbor) and further west (here) to be a poet. Today, she writes very little poetry but a fair amount of prose. Her first book, Tender Points, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2015; she is currently working on a novel. When she's not writing, she hosts the Amy's Kitchen Organics reading series and helps run the writing residency at Alley Cat Books.
Justus Kauffman Zimmerly, From Russia With Love: Tumbleweeds, Mennonites, and Other Invasive Species
My name is Justus. I live, work, and ride my bike in Oakland, Calif. I write on occasion. I was born in Chicago and grew up in various places across Western Canada, but mostly in a town that used to be called Pile of Bones. I studied Film Studies in school, edited a downhill skateboard magazine after that, and have played softball pretty much every Monday night for the last four years. I'm also a novice genealogist.