September 09, 2020

Filmmaker Shalini Kantayya’s, Coded Bias, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.  She directed the season finale of the National Geographic television series Breakthrough, Executive Produced by Ron Howard, broadcast globally in June 2017. Her debut, Catching the Sun, premiered at the LA Film Festival and was named a NY Times Critics’ Pick. Catching the Sun released globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016 with Executive Producer Leonardo DiCaprio, and was nominated for the Environmental Media Association Award for Best Documentary.  Kantayya is a TED Fellow, a William J. Fulbright Scholar, and an Associate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 

July 11, 2020

Diane Wang is an artist and designer working at the forefront of innovation. She was born and raised in the Bay Area and is currently based in San Francisco. Through her paintings, she explores perception, creation, and the human condition in our rapidly evolving world. She studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction, and currently works as a User Experience Design Lead on augmented reality. Her artistic practice explores psychological and societal unknowns that surface in her work in technological innovation, with optimistic visions for the future. Her work contains a harmonious coexistence of stark contrasts and drives intense and complex emotions through art and design.

June 30, 2020

Christie's works are layered, mixed media paintings that combine abstraction and realism. She works in layers with oil and acrylic paint, often incorporating original drawings and collage. This layering is a metaphor for the multifaceted dimensions of time, place, memory, and the everyday cultural stories that she's drawn to. Through utilizing veils of abstraction with the realistic subject matter, she seeks to evoke a sense of beauty, mystery, and emotional depth.

June 02, 2020

Amber Allen is a contemporary painter whose work combines her love of scientific theory, space travel, science fiction, and her Jewish heritage. Always on the lookout for fun yet thoughtful subjects, she favors bold colors, and explores the connections between our past and our future, with a current focus on space age themes as a metaphor for the progress of the human condition. Working primarily with oil paints, she uses a combination of palette knife and brushwork to give her work texture and interest.   

March 03, 2020

"Born and raised in rural area of California, Deborah grew up surrounded by nature, but close enough to San Francisco to be influenced by the city’s history of social, musical and political upheaval. Her lyric-driven and soul-wise music draws on folk, rock, and Americana and is often compared to Lucinda Williams and The Cowboy Junkies. Venturing into everything from funk and reggae to rock and blues, her expansive and eclectic sound has evolved over her years studying writing and poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO; voice and yoga in Mysore, India, and co-writing and collaborating with her Bay Area peers. ”

February 04, 2020

"Making art is a process that changes as the artist grows and changes.  We are constantly bombarded with images, conflicting information, and ideas.  In our current cultural moment, I want to stop in the maelstrom so that I may observe things closely in an attempt to answer the question of what matters most in life, what is it that is truly important. Right now, this truth is important to me." -Jennifer Fearon

January 07, 2020

"Animals are my primary subject mater. Animals utilized as stand-ins for people can say a lot about the human condition, but in a less individualistically identifiable way and I like this visual challenge as an artist. There are no human faces to distract from what my message is. That message is often narrative and personal. I can and often do, address environmental issues and endangered species within my artwork as a way to draw attention to the beauty and significance of these subjects. This duality of personal narrative and environmental consciousness is what interests me in my art making process." -Tara Tucker

January 07, 2020

Madelyn Covey is an Oakland/Emeryville based artist working in painting, drawing, video, and textiles. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2012 and currently works at Creative Growth Art Center. Covey's work deals with the relationship between people and media representation and how the production and prevalence of images affect culture. Cosplay, or costume play, is a motif throughout her work that explores how people are able to combat the commodification of heroes and reclaim the characters as representations of their own lived experiences.