The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is a contemporary performance and visual arts organization in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. PICA was founded in 1995 by Kristy Edmunds. Since 2003, it has presented the annual Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) every September in Portland, featuring contemporary and experimental visual art, dance, theatre, film/video, music, and educational and public programs from local, national, and international artists. As of November 2017, it is led by Executive Director Victoria Frey and Artistic Directors Roya Amirsoleymani, Erin Boberg Doughton, and Kristan Kennedy.
Dan Wool is an American composer and sound designer. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, where he played in the punk rock band The Strikers, he is based in San Francisco, California. He has worked in New York, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, and Anhui (China), creating scores for broadcast television projects, theatrical sound installations and more than 45 feature films, including nine films for celebrated cult filmmaker Alex Cox. From 2010 to 2021 Wool collaborated with filmmaker, and legendary special effects artist Phil Tippett to create the score for Tippett's epic stop-motion feature film Mad God. Wool has also composed music for television movies and episodic series for ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and HBO. He is often recognized for his work as principal composer in film score soundtrack-group Pray for Rain.
LA Freewaves, also known as Freewaves, is a Los Angeles–based nonprofit organization that exhibits new, uncensored, independent media, and produces free public art projects to engage artists and audiences on current social issues. Anne Bray, with representatives of other communities, founded LA Freewaves in 1989 and has worked to administer the non-profit since it was launched as an exhibition of multicultural video art at the American Film Institute's National Video Festival. Bray serves as director of the organization and has been working in the field of media arts since the mid-1970s as an artist and teacher.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a multimedia American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson is a pioneer in new media, and her work with technology and in media-based practices helped legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking. She has been referred to as a "new media pioneer" for the prescient incorporation of new science and technologies in her work. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts center in San Francisco, California, United States. Located in Yerba Buena Gardens, YBCA features visual art, performance, and film/video that celebrates local, national, and international artists and the Bay Area's diverse communities. YBCA programs year-round in two landmark buildings—the Galleries and Forum by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and the adjacent Theater by American architect James Stewart Polshek and Todd Schliemann. Betti-Sue Hertz served as Curator from 2008 through 2015.
Bill Daniel is an American experimental documentary film artist, photographer, film editor, and cinematographer. He is also an installation artist, curator, and former zine publisher. His full-length film, Who is Bozo Texino? about the tradition of hobo and railworker boxcar graffiti was completed in 2005 and has screened extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Daniel has collaborated with several artists from the Bay Area Mission School art movement, notably Margaret Kilgallen and has worked on multiple projects with underground director Craig Baldwin. Film/video artist Vanessa Renwick of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass has been a frequent touring partner, collaborator and co-curator.
Taraneh Hemami is an Iranian-born American visual artist, curator, and arts educator based in San Francisco. Her works explore the complex cultural politics of exile through personal and collective, multidisciplinary projects often through site specific installation art or participatory engagement projects.
Joseph Thomas Del Pesco is a contemporary art curator and arts writer. He is currently the International Director of Kadist.
Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. is a Filipina American artist trio active since 1995 and known for their use of humor and camp to explore issues of culture and gender. Founded in San Francisco by artists Eliza Barrios, Reanne Estrada, and Jenifer K. Wofford, the group's full name, Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., conflates a once-common stereotype of Filipina women as "mail order brides" with an acronym suggestive of an organized crime organization. The group has often been referred to in shorthand as "M.O.B.".
Ștefan Constantinescu,, is a Swedish-Romanian visual artist and film director living and working in Stockholm. He works with various mediums including film, artist books and paintings approaching the political through introspection to challenge notions of identity, while working in and with issues of post-communist Romania. Constantinescu grew up in Romania during the most austere years of communism, where an ordinary day began with a queue for almost anything - days of routine. As a result, his work is often strongly autobiographical. Within the work, monuments are challenged as permanent inscriptions of memory, fictional films resemble unofficial documentaries, and artist books challenge history and education. Known for his "powerful study of everyday terror" in his short film Troleibuzul 92 that was shown in the Venice Biennale 2009
Euan Macdonald is an artist based in Los Angeles. He has exhibited internationally, including La Biennale de Montréal in 2000 and International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville in 2005. In 2008, his video, SCLPTR (2005), was included in California Video at the Getty Center, curated by Glenn Phillips.
Ala Ebtekar is a contemporary artist known primarily for his work in painting, drawing, illumination, and installation. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe, and time, gazing back at us.
Sanaz Mazinani is an Iranian–born Canadian multidisciplinary visual artist, curator and educator, known for her photography and installation art. She is currently based in San Francisco and Toronto.
Noah Cowan was a Canadian artistic director, who served as the executive director of SFFILM from March 2014 to May 2019. He oversaw the organization's exhibition, education, and filmmaker services. Before joining SFFILM, Cowan was the artistic director of TIFF Bell Lightbox, and also worked as the co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival from 2004 to 2008.
Desirée Holman (born 1974) is an American artist who is based in the Bay Area, California.
Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The For-Site Foundation, established in 2003, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating collaborative art about place. Based in both San Francisco and Nevada City, California, For-Site collaborates with artists and national parks to create site-specific works of all media. Its work includes site-specific projects often completed at inaccessible sites in the Bay Area, including Alcatraz and the Presidio, and a residency program and educational partnerships that both take place on their 50-acre site in Nevada City. Gallerist Cheryl Haines founded For-Site in 2003.
GoNightclubbing is a collaboration between video artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong, who worked together to document the New York punk rock scene beginning in 1977. Ivers had previously worked with Metropolis Video from 1975 until their dissolution in 1977. Originally, Ivers and Armstrong were known as Advanced TV, but they incorporated as GoNightclubbing in 2001.
Prerana Reddy is a New York-based activist involved with community engagement who works in many different areas and disciplines. Reddy was the Director of Public Programs and Community Engagement at the Queens Museum from 2005–2018, where she organized screenings, performances, discussions, and community-based collaborative programs and exhibits both on and off-site. Reddy has been engaged in the Queens community for many years, and has developed various programs and initiatives for immigrants, youth, non-English speakers, etc. Reddy is involved in the intersection of art and community, having co-curated the exhibition "Fatal Love: South Asian American Contemporary Art Now", as well as coordinated two editions of "Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere", which commissioned eight artists to develop public art works that engage local residents on issues of neighborhood history and identity as well as tensions around its various transformations. Reddy's involvement in programs that engage communities include the access to language aid, healthcare, public space advocacy, and financial aid. Reddy received the Douglas Redd Fellowship for emerging leaders in the arts and community development sector, funded by the Ford Foundation and administered through Partners for Livable Communities.
Raheleh "Minoosh" Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born American interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, and educator. She works in many mediums, including in photography, video, installation, and performance. Her work is informed by the tension between Iran and the United States, as well as explorations of the self, of home, nature, and the environment. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
