2023 Review Panel

Round 1

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  • Meilani Clay is a writer, mama, and educator from Oakland, CA. Her debut poetry collection, and the creek don’t rise, was the winner of the 2021 Michael Rubin Book Award from San Francisco State University’s Fourteen Hills Press. Meilani aspires to be in school forever, to bridge worlds with her words, and to one day build forts out of books written by Black folks.

Meilani Clay

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Aneeta Mitha

  • Aneeta Mitha is a visual artist using photography, film, and new media to interrogate concepts of identity, visibility, and political complacency. They have been an artist resident at More Art for their work on the personal impacts of gentrification, and a fellow at Brooklyn Community Pride Center for their photo series on queer resiliency. Currently, they are the Public Programs and Digital Strategies Manager at San Francisco youth photography mentoring program, First Exposures.

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  • Rohan DaCosta is a multidisciplinary artist from Chicago, based in Oakland for the past 10 years. He serves on the Alameda County Arts Commission. In 2022, Rohan was a curator for The East Bay Photo Collective. His book, “The Edge of Fruitvale” was published by Nomadic Press in 2018.

Rohan DaCosta

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Christine No

  • Christine is a Korean American poet, filmmaker, and daughter of immigrants. She is the author of the book of poetry Whatever Love Means (Barrelhouse Books) and a Sundance Alum, VONA Fellow, two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee. She has served as Assistant Features Editor for the Rumpus, as Fellow, then as a Program Coordinator for VONA. Currently, Christine is a board member with Quiet Lightning, a Bay Area literary nonprofit.

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Paulina Vo-Griffin

  • Paulina Vo-Griffin has served youth in the South Bay Area through various roles in nonprofit organizations and as a middle school teacher. She’s worked with City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley, YMCA of Silicon Valley, Summit Public Schools, and AACI. She occasionally teaches dance classes throughout the Bay Area.

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  • Milo worked as a scenic designer in New York for over a decade on projects including 'Harry Potter & the Cursed Child', 'The Cher Show', 'La Traviata' at the Metropolitan Opera, and the Sochi 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Recently they returned to the Bay Area and are working in stained glass and other mixed media art - continuing to tell stories in new mediums.

Milo Lawrence

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Lani Rovzar

  • Lani Rovzar has a long career in Bay Area arts administration, branded enviroments and a personal fine arts practice. Passionate about supporting local artists and community, she founded 42 Degrees Arts Agency and has served on the advisory board of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. She has a BFA in Fibers and produces fine art photography through Lani Rovzar Studio.

Round 2

Creative Writing

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  • Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí is a KQED Community Reporter who works to make journalism more accessible across the Bay Area, telling stories in both English and Spanish across new platforms. One of his motivators to become a journalist was art — because of its unique capacity for storytelling. Painting, dance and music inform his passion to create multimedia journalism that is engaging and accessible to all.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomeli

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  • Rachel Economy is a poet-performer, sustainable designer, and resilient systems educator, with a penchant for mixing art forms to re-imagine and encounter the world around and within. Rachel's poetry and writing have appeared in Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, Dark Mountain, the Wild Gods anthology from New Rivers Press and Dark Matter Women Witnessing.

Rachel Economy

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  • Evelyn Ibarra is an architect and poet. She taught poetry and fiction at New York University, and served as both the Poetry and Translation Editor for the Washington Square Review. She worked as an architect for fifteen years, designing schools and houses in cities around the world. She is currently the Communications Manager at Kairos Music Academy.

Evelyn Ibarra

Film & Performance Art

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  • Paul Abueg-Igaz is an educator rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, currently serving as BAVC Media's San Francisco Youth Program Manager. With ten years of classroom teaching experience, he specializes in developing immersive project-based curriculum. Outside of these roles, Paul is also a freelance filmmaker, media creator, and curriculum writer.

Paul Abueg-Igaz

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  • Amanda Beane is a filmmaker who earned a BFA from California College of the Arts with a duel focus on metal-smithing and textiles. Multifaceted and always exploring new mediums, Amanda found her talents and skill sets uniquely suited to film. In 2013 she made film her career, and has become known for her innovative style and ability to coordinate ambitious visions into reality.

Amanda Beane

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  • Christine Chung is the Director of Operations & Design and Director of Choreography at SFBATCO. She focuses her work in non-profit theatre & performing arts, documentary short films, film festivals, and experiential immersive design. Her recent affiliations include Field of Vision, IF/Then Shorts, SXSW, SFFILM, Museum of Ice Cream, Revolutionary Love Project, and African Voices.

Christine Chung

Music

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  • Jessica Bejarano is the Founder and Music Director of the San Francisco Philharmonic, Assistant Conductor of Opera Parallele and serves as board member of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras. PBS NewsHour Weekend featured Jessica as an emerging female conductor and was named one of 10 artists to watch in KQED Arts’ "Bay Brilliant Top 10 Artists". Book publisher Lil’ Libros will publish Jessica’s first bilingual children’s book in Winter of 2024.

Jessica Bejarano

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  • June Bonacich has a master's degree in composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Since graduating in the late 90's, they have been teaching at the Conservatory in the precollege division. June’s specialty is working with very young students, teaching them musicianship and composition in an age-appropriate manner.

June Bonacich

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Bisi Obateru

  • Bisi Obateru is a Nigerian and American world music fusion artist using his sound as an intersection for movement and philosophy. He brings a unique presence to the stage whether he is performing live original tracks on guitar or singing over his Afropop/ Afrohouse beats. The melodies and rhythms captivate his audience on the dance floor or accompany a space as the soundtrack to your activity.

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  • Dylan Mattingly is a composer who creates transformative music that provides an opportunity to alter the way we see our world and place within it. He has spent the last decade creating, developing, and bringing to life Stranger Love, an ecstatic 6-hour durational opera, that will premiere May 20, 2023 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, commissioned by the LA Phil and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz.

Dylan Mattingly

Photography

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  • Chris Gould studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and works in the black and white analog tradition of photography. He has worked and taught darkroom photography at the Harvey Milk Photo Center for 12 years and with Youth Art Exchange for the past two. Chris has enjoyed taking pictures since he was a little kid.

Chris Gould

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  • Lani Rovzar has a long career in Bay Area arts administration, branded enviroments and a personal fine arts practice. Passionate about supporting local artists and community, she founded 42 Degrees Arts Agency and has served on the advisory board of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. She has a BFA in Fibers and produces fine art photography through Lani Rovzar Studio.

Lani Rovzar

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  • Ron Moultrie Saunders is a San Francisco-based photographic artist, public artist, landscape architect and teacher. He has exhibited his photograms across the country and is a co-founding member of Three Point Nine Art Collective, a collective of black artists in San Francisco. He is currently on the board for First Exposures which strives to empower youth through photography and for Black [Space] Residency located in the Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco.

Ron Saunders

Visual Art

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  • Nathan Lynch is a sculptor, performance artist, and is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Ceramics Program at California College of the Arts. His work has been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Gallery 16, San Francisco; the Exploratorium, San Francisco. He has a permant installation at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito and is the design lead for habitat restoration projects for endagered seabirds in the Pacific.

Nathan Lynch

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  • Lani Rovzar has a long career in Bay Area arts administration, branded enviroments and a personal fine arts practice. Passionate about supporting local artists and community, she founded 42 Degrees Arts Agency and has served on the advisory board of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. She has a BFA in Fibers and produces fine art photography through Lani Rovzar Studio.

Lani Rovzar

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  • Chris Thorson is an artist and the Dean of Arts Practice, Painting at the Oxbow School in Napa. She has exhibited nationally in such shows as Managing Object Expectations at the Hessel Museum, Bard College; Uncanny at Des Lee Gallery at Washington University in St. Louis, and Im(material) at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; and at galleries in New York, San Diego, and San Francisco.

Chris Thorson

Round 3

Creative Writing

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  • Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California and lives in Oakland.

Judy Halebsky

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  • Alexis Madrigal is the co-host of KQED’s Forum. He is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, and the creator of the podcast, Containers. He was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Information School, and is working on a book about Oakland and the Bay Area's revolutionary ideas.

Alexis Madrigal

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  • John Parman worked as an architect and planner for 40 years. He’s on the editorial and design committee of ARCADE, the Seattle design and culture magazine, and is an advisor to Room One Thousand, the annual publication of graduate students at U.C. Berkeley CED. John believes that finding one's own voice is also clearing away the tropes in order to work out what we think and how we want to articulate it.

John Parman

Film

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  • Kathleen Courtney has a long career in feature films and television and has been an Adjunct Professor at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco. She began her career as a Production Coordinator and later moved on to Production Manager and Producer. Kathleen has worked on many movies, including Steve Jobs, San Andreas, Chasing Mavericks as well as television shows such as 13 Reasons Why and This Is Us.

Kathleen Courtney

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  • Joanne Parsont is the Director of Education at the California Film Institute, providing year-round programs to youth and community members. Joanne is a media education specialist and film festival programmer specializing in children’s and documentary films, with over 25 years of experience with film festivals and film arts organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationwide, including a five-year stint as the first Director of Education at the San Francisco Film Society (now SFFILM).

Joanne Parsont

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  • Jody Stillwater has created work featured at the MoMA in NYC, Hammer Museum, de Young Museum, YBCA, Mutek, Transfer Gallery, and ISEA. He co-founded Lenape Creative Group, whose mission is to employ storytelling that prioritizes equity and inclusion, allowing for diverse stories from underrepresented communities to thrive. To Jody, making films and telling stories is the process of taking imagery and symbolism from culture, breaking it down to it's most base elements and building it back up for the present and future.

Jody Stillwater

Music Composition

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  • BZ Lewis is a 6 time Emmy winning Composer, Producer, and Engineer. He works out of Studio 132, a studio in Oakland, CA. His studio is also set up for Dolby Atmos mixing, and BZ has been making and recording music for 30+ years.

BZ Lewis

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  • Gabriella Smith is a composer and environmentalist. Her music comes from a love of play, exploring new sounds on instruments, building compelling musical arcs, and connecting listeners with the natural world in an invitation to find joy in climate action. Her first full-length album, Lost Coast, recorded in Iceland with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, was named one of NPR Music’s “26 Favorite Albums Of 2021 (So Far)” and a “Classical Album to Hear Right Now” by The New York Times.

Gabriella Smith

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  • Edward Schocker is a composer and performer who creates music with made/found materials and alternate tuning systems. His music has been performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Stanford Lively Arts, Internationales Klangkunstfest in Berlin, East/West Festival in Tokyo and Culture Station Seoul 284 in South Korea. Edward is creating a new multimedia work for ensemble PHASE for the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Edward Schocker

Music Performance

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  • Costas Dafnis is a Greek-American composer, director and sound designer based in San Francisco. Costas has had the opportunity to support youth creativity in film, theater and music through his work at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco Art Institute, Young People's Symphony Orchestra, University of the Redlands, Festival Napa Valley, The Bay School of San Francisco, and the Berkeley Symphony.

Costantinos Dafnis

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  • Ruby Ibarra is a rapper and spoken word artist from the Bay Area, CA who tours across the United States and the Philippines. Ruby has been featured on notable publications such as NPR, Huffington Post, Paper Mag, Buzzfeed, XXL Magazine, NY Times, LA Times, and the SF Chronicle, among others. In 2022, Ruby was featured in billboard campaigns by Amazon Music and Spotify, and was a a songwriter for Season 1 and 2 of the FOX Network’s hit TV show, The Cleaning Lady.

Ruby Ibarra

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  • Justin Sun is the Interim Associate Dean & Executive Director for the Pre-College & Continuing Education Divisions at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is also is a percussion faculty member in the Pre-College and teaches with the Blue Devils Performing Arts. Justin received his Bachelor's Degree in Percussion Performance from California State University, Long Beach, and his Master's Degree in Percussion Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Justin Sun

Performance Art

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  • Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş is a poet, dance artist, and former US-UK Fulbright candidate from Northern California. Her latest commission as a choreographer was for a feature-length dance film, scene r-eco-ver, exhibited at World Stage Design 2022 in Alberta, Canada. Her ongoing project, strikethrough-score.org, is a digital platform where poets can generate choreographic scores for dancers.

Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş

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  • Christell Lewis is an actor, poet, and singer who has performed on many stages on the East and West Coasts. She toured as a performer educator for Kaiser Permanente's Educational Theatre programs, performing in K-8 live theatrical productions all over Northern CA. She is an alum of Voices of our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) and is developing new work as a writer and playwright.

Christell Lewis

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  • Julie Phelps is the Artistic & Executive Director of CounterPulse, and a celebrated curator and performance artist. As Artistic & Executive Director of CounterPulse, she combines grassroots community engagement and institutional frameworks to create a dynamic home for art and culture. Most recently, Phelps raised $7 million to renovate and acquire CounterPulse’s building, launching a new model for placing arts at the center of community development as the pilot project of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust.

Julie Phelps

Photography

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  • John Chiara is a professional photograher and artist. He has been an artist in residence at Crown Point Press, San Francisco; Gallery Four, Baltimore; and at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito. His work has been shown in many places including the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the de Young Musuem, San Francisco, Pier 24, San Francisco, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angles. In 2018, New York Times Magazine had an in-depth profile of his solo exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC.

John Chiara

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  • Ellen Shershow is a commercial and fine arts photographer based in Oakland, CA. She has been profiled about her pet portraiture on NPR's Marketplace, LA Magazine and Slate, and spoke at Today at Apple as part of Apple's photo lab. Ellen continues to hone her own art practice through residencies and is currently on the Board of Directors for the East Bay Photo Collective.

Ellen Shershow

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  • Heather Snider is a curator, writer, fundraiser, and consultant with 30 years of experience in the fine art photography field. She is currently the Director of Individual Giving at the Exploratorium. Previously she was the Executive Director of PhotoAlliance and SF Camerawork.

Heather Snider

Visual Art

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  • Tova Lobatz has produced over 100 art installations nationwide and successfully launched two public art projects. She advises artists, collectors, architects, designers, and brands on creating environments that inspire them by connecting them with the right artist and delivering a seamless project from start to finish. As Director of Heron Arts, Tova emphasizes programming that reflects the community, is inclusive, and responsive to the needs of the diverse, emerging Bay Area art scene.

Tova Lobatz

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  • Brian Singer, also known as Someguy, is a San Francisco based fine artist whose studio practice and large-scale public projects address a variety of social justice issues. With a meticulous rigor and legibility informed by his experience as a graphic designer and visual communicator, Singer’s work invites critical engagement through surprising juxtapositions of media and wordplay.

Brian Singer

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  • Haoyun Erin Zhao is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, California, working in printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation. She has been published in various magazines and exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs such as the de Young Museum, Exploratorium Museum, Art Santa Fe Contemporary Art Fair, International Print Center New York, Galerie Kuchling Berlin, Root Division SF, Heron Arts, Sanchez Art Center, Glass Rice Gallery.

Haoyun Erin Zhao