Carlos Aguirre (actor, musician, vocal percussionist, educator) has been performing and educating in the Bay Area for over 24 years. He has shared the stage with The Roots, Eryka Badu, Black Eyed Peas, Mary J. Blige, Jam Master Jay, and L.L. Cool J among others. He is also currently producing his original rap and beatbox adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart as well as recording and releasing new music. Aguirre shares his experience by teaching at various schools and at-risk environments throughout the Bay Area.
Ayssar Arida is a transdisciplinary designer, entrepreneur and author. His work bridges brands and skyscrapers, toys and online platforms, design and quantum physics, video games and residential communities.
An educator and TEDx speaker, he has written widely on transdisciplinarity, cross-culturality and the future of design education, starting from his book Quantum City, a radical holistic rethinking of the way we imagine, teach, and design cities.
He co-founded MakerBrane, the award-winning physical and digital ed-tech platform used in schools to teach through toys. He created Urbacraft, a customizable construction toy that partnered with museums and schools across 3 continents to teach urban design to kids and families.
Previously he was The New School’s Parsons MENA ambassador and strategy consultant, and ran Q-DAR, a development/architecture/research agency in London.
After living in London, Paris, New York, Beirut, and Marseille, he recently moved to San Francisco where he’s developing new A.I. interfaces around 3D design (SceneMaker.Ai) and culture (beit.ai).
A critically acclaimed author in France and a tech entrepreneur residing in the Bay area, Jerome Baccelli has published six novels, including four that explore the complex relationship between us and technology. From observing the history of the Silicon Valley in light of the Ohlone native tribes who once lived in those territories, to describing how the evasive concept of the ether over the ages has influenced the dematerialization of technology and money today, or by depicting the life of a white collar employee who has disappeared physically but not digitally, Baccelli’s work typically sits right at the border between fiction and nonfiction, with a deliberate step into the imaginary world. His last novel, published in France last January, relates the story of corporate employees who discover a forgotten floor within their office building and make it their home.
Allegra Andrea Bandy produces and collaborates in a variety of multimedia projects, from audiobook production and publication, music composition and production, podcast and radio, voice over acting and narration, and sound engineering (in the studio and out in the field). As a music composer, producer and vocal performer, she incorporates an array of Soul, Jazz, Funk, Rock, and World genres into her music. She has been an educator in a variety of subjects, both in and outside of the public and private classroom, for over 20 years. Currently working primarily out of the San Francisco Bay Area at her production company, ODDUA PRODUCTIONS.
Mac Barnett is a New York Times-bestselling author of stories for children. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. Mac’s books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Awards, three E.B. White Read Aloud Awards, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, Germany’s Jugendliteraturpreis, China’s Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award, The Netherlands’ Silver Griffel, and Italy’s Premio Orbil. Mac lives in Oakland, California.
Bay Area Theatre Cypher is a creative hub for multi-hyphenate hip hop theatre artists that prioritize equity, radical discussion, and social justice. We live at the crossfader of theatre and hip hop as a means to dismantle the traditional power structures found within the theater-making process by channelling the Hip Hop Cypher as a conduit for inclusive storytelling. We are an artist centric collective that creates film, live performance, and full length theatrical projects (virtual and in-person).
Molly Bentley is the executive producer and co-host of the national radio show and podcast Big Picture Science that airs locally on KALW. She has worked as a science reporter for the BBC, including World Service, Radio 4 and Science/Nature Online, and has taught radio writing and podcast production at the University of California, Santa Cruz Science Communication Program.
After getting her degree in architecture in 2019 and spending the next six years working for various agencies, Mathilde Billet joined Bellastock in 2016, broadening her scope of study and projects around contemporary challenges for the circular economy applied to the reuse of building materials, while helping promote such practices among a wide spectrum of individuals and organizations (students, professionals, institutions, inhabitants, etc.). In 2020, Bellastock was awarded the Jeunes Urbanisme Prize and named in Trait magazine’s “Top 100 Influential Urban Planners” (“100 qui font la ville”).
Ken Brill (pianist) played synth/keyboards for SF Playhouse’s 2022-2023 production of As You Like It, Assistant MD/Synth Programmer for Follies, Keyboards for Groundhog Day the Musical, associate music director, synth programmer, and keyboard for Follies and also Sunday in the Park with George, onstage pianist for Company, and MD/Pianist for the 2019 production Scrooge in Love at 42nd Street Moon. Ken is also an actor, composer, and a Registered Merit California Court Reporter.
Roy Brown: Jazz pianist, Hammond organist, recording artist, education, Roy has been a part of the San Francisco Bay Area jazz scene for the past 25 years. He leads his own groups as well as having worked with several notable local jazz artists, including vibraphonist Yancie Taylor, singer Frankye Kelly, trumpeter Larry Douglas, and saxophonist Jules Broussard. Roy has been an instructor at San Francisco State University along with Dr. Dee Spencer and Clifford Brown, Jr. and has taught at Berkeley City College. Roy can currently be seen weekly at the Hotel Adagio in San Francisco.
Artist Windy Chien is best known for her 2016 work, The Year of Knots, in which she learned a new knot every day for a year. Her work ranges in size from a knot that can fit in the palm of a child’s hand to room-sized installations that are sought after by private collectors. Following long careers at Apple and as owner of legendary music shop Aquarius Records, she launched her studio in 2015. Select clients include the National Geographic Society, the De Young Museum, the San Francisco MOMA, Nobu Hotels, Google, and the Kering Group, and her work has been covered by Wired, The New York Times and Martha Stewart. Windy’s book about her work was published by Abrams in 2019.
Community Music Center makes high quality music accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, regardless of financial means. Classes are offered on a sliding scale and some are completely tuition-free.
CMC students range in age from a few months to nearly 100 years old, and they enjoy classes in everything from Western classical to Chinese to Latin Music. Audience members enjoy events ranging from square dances to contemporary music performances. Last year more than 2,800 students of all ages studied at CMC and thousands enjoyed CMC performances.
Executive Director: Julie Rulyak Steinberg
Beth Custer is a performer and composer renowned for her clarinet dexterity and unique voice. She’s composed for numerous productions including the films of Brad Coley, William Farley and Cathy Lee Crane, for Campo Santo Theatre, AXIS Dance Company, Flyaway Productions, The Joe Goode Performance Group, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and Zeitgeist. With guitarist David James she co-leads the funky ensemble Russian Telegraph, she leads the esteemed quartet Clarinet Thing, she co-founded the 4th world ensemble Trance Mission and the trip-hop duo Eighty Mile Beach, and she’s an original member of the live music to silent film purveyors Club Foot Orchestra. Beth is about to release a CD with long-time collaborator guitarist Will Bernard. She runs her own CD label BC Records and music publishing company All Hands On Deck.
Eva Davoine is a PhD student at Haas, UC Berkeley. She holds a BA and an MA in Economics from Sciences Po Paris and worked as a pre-doctoral fellow at the World Bank. Her current research is at the intersection of Public, Political and Development Economics. She is particularly interested in tax resistance movements and inequalities, both in developed and developing countries.
Victor Devisme is a visiting student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies sociology at the ENS Paris-Saclay in France and is currently enrolled in a PhD Track program in the laboratory IDHE.S ( Institutions and historical dynamics of the economy and society). His research interests include philanthropy and the role of technology in the renewal of classrooms. Through ethnography, he investigates summits and conferences where philanthropists and ‘edupreneurs’ create a new vision of a ‘good’ education with the concourse of nonprofits, as well as alternative classrooms. Drawing on the work of a few French ethnographers, he tries to write at the intersection of social sciences and literature.
Natalie Foster is the President and co-founder of the Economic Security Project, a network dedicated to advancing a guaranteed income in America and reining in the unprecedented concentration of corporate power, and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative. Prior to that she was the CEO and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for people–driven economic change, with Van Jones.Foster served as digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America (OFA) and the Democratic National Committee. She built the first digital department at the Sierra Club and served as the deputy organizing director for MoveOn.org. She’s been awarded fellowships at the Institute for the Future, Rockwood Leadership Institute and New America California, and is a board member of the California Budget and Policy Center, the Change.org global foundation and Liberation in a Generation, a project to close the racial wealth gap.
Amory Gethin is a PhD candidate at the Paris School of Economics and a visiting researcher at University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on documenting the evolution of poverty and inequality from a comparative and historical perspective. In particular, his recent projects investigate the impact of public education and healthcare on poverty reduction, as well as the role of taxes and social policies in explaining differences in inequalities around the world.
Mr. David Glamamore is the well-respected “Granny” of the House of MORE!, helping to produce parties and drag shows that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for TARC (Tenderloin AIDS Research Center), local LGBT youth outreach programs, and transgender equality nonprofits. In April of 2021, he was elected Emperor of the Imperial Council of San Francisco, Inc and now carries the title of Emperor XLIX After Norton. As Mr. David, he has been renowned for creating couture gowns, costumes, and high fashion garments for drag queens, trans performers, burlesque dancers, and other residents of the queer nightlife. Globally known, with decades of notoriety, his collections in San Francisco have shown at SFMOMA, Saks, Levi’s, the JCC, SF Pride’s mainstage, City Hall, and three times at the DeYoung Museum. Mr. David Glamamore’s life, both on stage and behind, has been one of service: to protect queers, allies, and queer spaces, to promote drag, to teach the youth, and to clothe those who make San Francisco’s unique nightlife community colorful, exciting and as wild and free as it can be.
Marina Gorbis is Executive Director of the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a 54-year old non-profit civic futures organization. Marina’s current research, the work of the Equitable Enterprise Initiative and Workable Futures Initiative, focuses on transformations in the world of work and new forms of value creation. She introduced the concept of Universal Basic Assets (UBA) as a framework to examine the roles assets play in economic security, as well as tools for wider asset distribution for greater equity. Marina’s book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World, draws connections between the changes in technology infrastructure and organizations, from education to governance and health.
Hélène Goupil is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist who films, produces, and edits documentaries. She loves finding the beauty in everyday life and bringing people’s stories to life. She holds a Master’s Degree from U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Chris Grady, trumpet, has been teaching, performing and recording music in the San Francisco Bay area for more than 30 years. Chris has studied at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has performed and recorded with many bay area groups and artists including Tom Waits, Jewel, Lukas Nelson, Ben Rector, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Club Foot Orchestra, and many others.
Shawn Harris is an award-winning creator of books for kids. His authorial debut, Have You Ever Seen A Flower, was called a “stunning tour de force…” by The New York Times, and was the recipient of a Caldecott Honor. The National Museum of Wildlife Art awarded Shawn’s cut-paper art in A Polar Bear in the Snow (by Mac Barnett) the Bull-Bransom Award for excellence in the field of children’s book illustration with a focus on nature and wildlife. Harris has illustrated a number of other books, including Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers, and Everyone’s Awake by Colin Meloy. Shawn lives in Northern California, where he also likes to write songs, surf, and play racquetball.
Artist dedicated to earth care, works have taken the shape of upgraded soils, gardens for insects, a seed library, an agriculture 1000 year political program or threading out earth knowledge in folktale. In the past few years, strategizing on how to bring back the beaver in France during fires and climate change has taken over.
Azadeh (Azi) Jamalian, is founder and CEO at The GIANT Room creative STEM platform for children, helping the next generation of creatives and inventors to think big and act on their dreams. Jamalian is a TED speaker, former head of education strategy at littleBits, and co-founder of Tiggly. She has a proven record of designing learning products that millions of children have engaged with and thousands of schools have implemented in their programs. Through her work at The GIANT Room, they have provided creative STEM programs to more than 30,000 families in person and online, and through their partnership with schools, museums, libraries, and cultural organizations such as TED Ed and Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Through her work at littleBits, she has worked with thousands of educators around the country to strategize their STEAM (STEM + Arts) offerings at scale. Through her work at Tiggly, she has overseen product design and development with a focus on both consumer and education markets. Azadeh has a PhD in cognitive studies in education from Teachers College Columbia University, a bachelor’s degree in systems engineering. She has published journal articles and book chapters on a broad range of topics such as designing learning platforms for children, emerging educational tech, game design, mathematical education, and cognition. Dr. Jamalian has received numerous awards including “IES Prize for Excellence in Research on Cognition and Student Learning” and “The Cooney Center’s certificate of innovation in Children’s Learning”.
Bay Area native Alexis Lane Jensen is a classically trained singer who maintains a diverse performance career. She is at home on a variety of stages- from choral, opera, musical theater and cabaret to jazz, pop, and rock. Specializing in the music of Kurt Weill and his contemporaries, Ms. Jensen enjoys presenting their work along with standards from the American Songbook and art songs by both well and lesser known composers. She has also sung the work of many local composers and has developed a treasured relationship with Allison Lovejoy in particular. Recent engagements have included Fräulein Kost in Cabaret with Contra Costa Civic Theater and Feklusha in Kátya Kabanová with West Edge Opera.
Milicent is a Creatrix. Passionate about hosting the dreams and visions of Black women, she is the founding Executive Director of The Octavia Fund.
Milicent has found her calling in this work: creating sacred space for Black women to remember and embody their truest selves in service of collective liberation. Her own awakening to the power of rest, woven together with her Black lineage’s gifts of radical imagination and prophetic visioning, guide her towards the very heart of justice. Milicent knows that cultivating creativity and desire is necessary; she understands rest and dreaming as revolutionary acts.
Milicent spent nearly two decades before The Octavia Fund working towards justice through direct service, policy, advocacy, urban planning, and philanthropy. In all of her work, she is guided by a deep desire to nourish community, build bridges, heal divides, and advance equity and justice for all. She works in service of Spirit, is guided by her ancestors, and prays that all that she does will be a blessing to her descendants.
Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online arts column for Forbes. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, a visiting scholar at San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, consulting philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. A monograph about his work at the intersection of philosophy and art, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag.
Dr. Bernie Krause began his career as a backup studio guitarist for early Motown sessions while attending the University of
Michigan. After a short stint as a graduate student at MIT in Communications, he joined The Weavers, filling the tenor position originally created by Pete Seeger, debuting at Carnegie Hall with them in 1963. When the Weavers disbanded, Bernie and his late music partner, Paul Beaver, introduced the Moog synthesizer to pop music and film where his work is featured on many albums of that era, including those of the George Harrison, Mick Jagger, David Byrne and Bryan Eno, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, the Byrds, and the Doors not to mention Beaver & Krause’s own albums. Bernie’s contributions can be heard on over 135 major feature films like Apocalypse Now, Performance, Love Story, Cast Away, and Rosemary’s Baby. In 1981, having earned his doctorate in Sound Arts with an internship in bioacoustics, Bernie began his second career as a founder of Soundscape Ecology – a new field of study focusing on the soundscapes of marine and terrestrial biomes. As a sound designer, Bernie has been a leader in the transformation of scientific data into large scale works of art like the one that will be featured at the Exploratorium. He is the author of “The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places,” the history of how animals taught us to dance and sing, and the title of the Exploratorium exhibit that will have its West Coast premier on June 10th. He is also a co-composer of a symphony based on the book and commissioned by the BBC, created with Oxford colleague, Richard Blackford. Together they also composed Biophony, the ballet score commissioned by the Alonzo King LINES Ballet and premiered in 2015 at the Yerba Buena Center. The Great Animal Orchestra, is a commission by the Fondation
Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, and has been performed in Paris, London, Milan, Shanghai, Seoul, Sydney, Lille, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. It has been heard and seen by over 1.5m visitors since its 2016 Paris premier. Dr. Krause lives and works with his wife and partner, Katherine, in Sonoma.
San Francisco Bay vocalist Angela LaFlamme is a throwback to a bygone era-with an edgy modern twist. Her love not only for storytelling, but creating a unique nostalgic vibe come from years of studying the tarnished elegance of Billie Holiday, the whimsical smirk of Fats Waller, the full throttle kick of Screamin Jay Hawkins. From singing at an Oakland warehouse party to the sumptuous main stage of The Edwardian Ball or legendary rock venue Bottom of the Hill to the top floor of The De Young Museum, Angela is completely at home. Her dedication, sheer joy and passion in creating not just music but an unforgettable atmosphere are a thing to behold.
Landa Lakes is a Chickasaw writer, activist and artist. As drag persona Landa Lakes, in 2005, she founded drag performance groups in San Francisco including the Two-Spirit Native American drag troupe, the Brush Arbor Gurlz, and the creative and campy House of Glitter.
Ségal Le Guern Herry is a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics in Sciences Po Paris and a Fulbright visiting scholar at UC Berkeley since August 2022. His research investigates issues related to the economics of taxation. He is particularly interested in tax evasion and its implications for redistribution, tax progressivity and inequality. He graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris-Saclay and obtained an MSc in Economics from ENSAE.
Pascal Lee is a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames. He studied physics and geology at the University of Paris, and got his PhD in astronomy and space sciences at Cornell where he was Carl Sagan’s last T.A.. He is internationally known for his work on water on Mars, caves on the Moon, the human exploration of Mars, and interstellar travel. He has led 30 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica to study planets by comparison with Earth, and is a recipient of the United States Antarctic Service Medal. He is also an FAA-certified helicopter pilot and flight instructor, and the painter of spacetime art collected worldwide.
Wouter Leenders is a PhD student at the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. In his research he studies the distribution of wealth, income, and taxes, as well as the effect of government policies on these distributions. He obtained a BA in Economics from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Daiane Lopes da Silva is the artistic director and co-founder of Kinetech Arts, where she explores the intersection of dance, science and technology. Since 2013, she has created over 10 full-lenght performances, which have been performed locally and internationally. She taught couses at SSU, UC Davis and USF, and choreographed for BDP at UC Berkeley. Her residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, ODC Theater, Dancing Lab at NCCAkron, among others. She studied contemporary dance at P.A.R.T.S and received a BA in Psychology from SFSU.
Award-winning pianist and composer Allison Lovejoy is a San Francisco favorite. Her eclectic and entertaining music ranges from classical to jazz, blues and cabaret. Her sultry, smart and brilliant stylings bring vintage and modern music together in a unique and captivating style. Miss Lovejoy is a graduate of the SF Conservatory of Music, and has performed and toured in the USA, Europe, Japan and Mexico.
Renée Lubin holds the record as the longest running performer in a Musical Revue and is noted by the SF Chronicle as a city treasure for her 34 year run with Beach Blanket Babylon. Other leading performances include DREAMGIRLS, AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ and FOR COLORED GIRLS. A San Francisco native she has performed with numerous theatrical companies including The Presidio Theatre, Theaterworks, SF Symphony, SF Gay Men’s Chorus, SF Giants, SF 49er’s, Oakland A’s and the San Jose Sharks. Renée is the former Vocal Jazz Coach at San Francisco State University and continues to perform at various venues throughout the Bay Area. Renée is a proud recipient of the SF Mayor’s Community Stalwart Award by the Human Rights Commission. Visit www.reneelubin.com.
Dr. Franck Marchis is a senior planetary astronomer and chair of the exoplanet group at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer and Founder at Unistellar. He began full-time work at the Institute in June 2011 after leaving a joint position with Institute and the department of astronomy at University of California, Berkeley. Marchis moved to the United States in October 2000 shortly after getting a Ph.D. from the University of Toulouse in France that he acquired while traveling around the world for his research and for the sake of exploration. Over the past nineteen years, he has dedicated his work to the study of our solar system, specifically the search for asteroids with moons, using mainly ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO). More recently he has been also involved in the definition of new generation of AOs for 8 -10 m class telescopes and future Extremely Large Telescopes. He has also developed algorithms to process and enhance the quality of astronomical and biological images. He is currently the collaboration manager of the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey, which consists in imaging and characterizing Jupiter-like exoplanets using an extreme AO system designed for the Gemini South telescope. Today, Marchis dedicates most of his energy to instruments capable of imaging and characterizing Earth-like exoplanets by being involved in education, public outreach, technology, and scientific investigations related to those ambitious projects both in the United States and in Europe. Marchis is also involved in startups related to astronomy so he joined Unistellar as a Chief Scientific Officer and VR2Planets as a scientific advisor in 2017. Marchis is a member of numerous science committees including the SETI Science council, the GPI steering Committee, the TMT Science Definition Team, PLOS One editor board, the Project Blue and the PLANETS Foundation Advisory board. He has co-authored more than 380 scientific publications, trained numerous students, and served as a science consultant and interviewee for numerous documentaries and movies in English, French, and Spanish. The asteroid (6639) was named Marchis in honor of his discovery of the first triple-asteroid system in 2007. He has been an affiliated Astronomer at Observatoire de Paris since 2003
Composer Richard Marriott is the founder and artistic director of the Club Foot Orchestra, an ensemble best known for their live music performance with silent films at venues such as Lincoln Center and SF JAZZ. He has written music for dance, television, opera, film, video games and toys. He studied Indian music with Ali Akbar Khan, shakuhachi with Masayuki Koga and synthesizer design with Serge Tchrepnin. He worked with Atari Games as a composer and sound designer 1992-1997. Oakland Symphony’s late music director Michael Morgan commissioned and premiered his Ghost Ship Cello Concerto in November 2018 as a memorial to the 36 victims of the December 2016 warehouse fire.
Rubén Martínez is a native of Los Angeles and the son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador. He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University and is the author of several books, including Desert America: A Journey Across Our Most Divided Landscape and Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail. He is the host of the VARIEDADES performance series. His most recent production, Little Central America, 1984 received a New England Foundation for the Arts national touring grant and will be staged in Washington, D.C., Houston, Tx and Berkeley.
Maureen McVerry has been a performer in the Bay Area for the last several decades. Miss McVerry has acted in eleven feature films, on TV sitcoms, movies of the week, and lots of commercials but her true passion is live performance. A member of the actors union Equity since 1984, she has appeared in one hundred (if not more ) Theatrical productions. Her most recent role was Phyllis in the Stephen Sondheim musical FOLLIES which ran for 80 performances the summer of 2022 at SF Playhouse. Since 1993, she has written and performed her solo show, VERRY McVerry – which is constantly evolving.
Raphaelle Moatti is the founder of Delicious Future. Our mission is to accelerate the shift to regenerative eating – food that benefits human health, the resilience of our communities, and the natural environment.
An award-winning design executive, Raphaelle developed expertise in creating digital tools that foster positive behavior change, specifically in health, wellness, and nutrition.
As an insatiably curious explorer and connector, Raphaelle produces and curates engaging experiences to inspire new thinking including innovation and design charrettes and challenges, the Digital Health Summit conference at CES and now Future Feasts and Food for Thought to showcase chef-prepared regenerative cuisine.
Raphaelle contributes actively to the emerging fields of Service Design and Transition Design, and contributes to several communities of transformation, including the Design Science Studio (Buckminster Fuller Institute), Climate Draft, and Denizens.
Raphaelle holds a Masters in Economics and Marketing from Sciences-Po Lille (France) and published research on international children’s rights as a PhD student at CUNY. She also studied Interior Design and Architecture at UC Berkeley.
Born and raised in Paris, France, Raphaelle has called the Bay Area home for two decades, where her twins are Juniors in High School. Before settling in California, Raphaelle lived in Sao Paulo, Miami, and New York City. Her lifelong passion for good food comes from her rich, mixed heritage of both French and North African cultures.
When not working, you can find Raphaelle connecting with loved ones, swimming laps, experimenting in the kitchen, or reading about food, psychology, or systems design.
Davied Morales is an actor and rapper from San Jose. He received most of his training through Foothill College where he earned his AA in Theatre Arts and was featured in many of their productions. He’s worked for companies such as City Lights Theatre Company, Shotgun Players, SF Playhouse, BATC, A.C.T. & TheatreWorks. Throughout the week Davied works at The Red Ladder Theatre Company, teaching improv workshops in prison. He has been rapping for almost 10 years, releasing albums, mixtapes, and singles under his artist name “Activepoet”. That is also where you can find him on social media.
Juanita MORE! is a denizen of the limelight. For almost three decades, the laudable hostess has blitzed San Francisco with high glamour, drag irreverence, and danceable beats illuminating the city. MORE! continues to be a heaping dollop of generosity and a sprinkle of nerve. She inspires those around her to make positive differences in their lives and communities, doing it all with timeless elegance and an innovative spirit. Miss MORE! holds the title of Absolute Empress 56 of the Imperial Council of San Francisco –– one of the oldest non-profit organizations globally. MORE! tirelessly fundraises for organizations in San Francisco that are adamant about helping communities in the seven-by-seven thrive, all while shining light and offering support to those who’ve been overlooked for far too long. Her culinary expressions are an extension of what mothers have been doing in their kitchens for generations — which, she states, is sharing “loads of love.”
Baptiste Morizot was born in 1983 at Draguignan. After studying philosophy at the Ecole Normale
Supérieure in Lyon, he started teaching at Aix-Marseille University. A rising star in the field of the
environmental humanities, his prizewinning books include Wild Diplomacy, On the Animal Trail,
Ways of Being Alive and Rekindling Life.
Oakland-based musician, composer, improviser and instigator, Suki O’Kane works with artists from a wide array of music, movement, expanded cinema and public art genres. She is a student of monumental and durational forms, combining Jurassic electronics, everyday objects and found sounds to create noisy, hand held miniatures. Trained as a mallet percussionist, her relationship with the bass drum is one of her happiest.
Arthur is a licensed architect and senior urban designer at SITELAB urban studio, in San Francisco. He is working on significant projects in the Bay Area, like mixed-use developments in Mountain View and San José for Google, and the Waterfront Resilience Program for the Port of San Francisco.Working in Paris and Bordeaux (FR) as a licensed architect, taking minimalist mixed-use architecture from the conceptual stage through to construction, Arthur chose to shift scales. With a newfound focus in urban design, Arthur’s international work redeveloped mid-century industrial wastelands, transforming them into new mixed-use vibrant neighborhoods.Moving to California, Arthur constantly imagines new urban environments, with specific attention to the various characters each neighborhood can take—deeply rooted in their histories, geographies, and communities.Arthur also teaches international urban practices at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, in Paris (FR). He organizes an annual workshop in San Francisco that pushes students out of their comfort zone and develops creative thinking focused on design and planning strategies.
Martin Rauchbauer is a tech governance, and tech diplomacy expert, as well as a senior Austrian diplomat, who currently is on a sabbatical in the San Francisco Bay Area after having served for two years as Austria’s first Tech Ambassador in Silicon Valley. During more than five years as Head of Open Austria and Austrian Consul in San Francisco, Martin shaped the emerging field of tech diplomacy, engaged in transatlantic digital diplomacy and digital human rights. He also developed digital humanism as a strategic focus of Austrian foreign policy. Martin initiated Open Austria’s “Art + Tech Lab”, and co-founded the European art + tech + policy initiative “The Grid”. Currently, he is focussing his research on how tech governance is conceptually based on our understanding of the human, nature, and technology.
A long-time social justice advocate, Ms. Rosenmoss is committed to using the arts to bring people into the climate conversation and ensuring that all San Franciscans reap the benefits of the city’s environmental initiatives. She recently retired from the San Francisco Environment Department where she developed resources for renewable energy, zero emission vehicles, and climate initiatives, and created formal partnerships with arts organizations, community groups, and the city’s 27 public libraries. Prior to joining the Department, Rosenmoss was an educator integrating Science and the Arts into educational programs for youth in foster care and low-income housing. A former dancer and aerialist, Rosenmoss holds a BS in Electrical Engineering. She is currently a guest lecturer in San Francisco State University’s Environmental Studies program, sits on the board of Mission Science Workshop and the leadership council for the Climate Music Project.
Sara Shelton Mann trained and performed in the companies of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis from 1966 to 1972. After working with the Halifax Dance Co-Op in Nova Scotia from 1972 to 1979, she settled in San Francisco and created Contraband, which toured through 1996. As artistic director of Mixed Bag Productions, Mann’s recent projects include: ECHO (2018), Vortex (2019-2020), and 7 excavations (2021-present). Mann has received 6 Isadora Duncan (“Izzy”) Awards, a 2000 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, and a 2016 artist award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Tommy Soulati Shepherd (he/him/they) is an internationally renowned actor, playwright, author, composer, educator, rapper, drummer, beatboxer and music producer. Tommy (aka Emcee Soulati) is a longtime member of the performance group Campo Santo and Oakland’s own Alphabet Rockers, the Grammy-winning intergenerational Hip Hop group with the mission of making music that makes change. Tommy has composed, performed and toured internationally with Alphabet Rockers and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, collaborating on Scourge, the break/s, Spoken World, red, black and GREEN: a blues and /peh-LO-tah/ and won a 2018 Isadora Duncan Award for his composition work.
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens create multimedia projects that aim to make environmentalism more sexy, fun, and diverse. In 2008, they launched the Ecosex Movement which has spread around the planet. They are co-directors of the non-profit organization, E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF (Environmental Art, Research, Theory & Happenings.) Their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—Earth as Lover chronicles their art/life adventures. They are also filmmakers, and received a Guggenheim grant (2021) to produce their next documentary, Playing with Fire. They’ve built a community of collaborators which includes punks, queers, artists, activists, scholars, sex workers and folks on the fringe who love the Earth.
Drawing from experience and self-directed research, Rayyane Tabet explores stories that offer an alternative understanding of major socio-political events through individual narratives. Informed by his training in architecture and sculpture, his work investigates paradoxes in the built environment and its history by way of installations, interventions and performances that reconstitute the perception of physical and temporal distance.
The Mermen are an American rock band from San Francisco, California. The group’s sound was originally rooted in surf and psychedelic music of the 1960s. Although their music delves into many genres, the sound is non-commercial. In concert, the Mermen always perform as a trio: electric guitar, electric bass, and drums ( Jennifer Burnes on bass, Martyn Jones on drums, Jim Thomas on guitar.) Their music is rooted in the kind of reverb“surf” music sound made by Duane Eddy, the Ventures, Dick Dale and Link Wray, and Jack Nietzshe ( i.e. The Lonely Surfer). Their sound is often described as distinctly of the American West (especially the West Coast) This is a modern American sound: Dick Dale meets Sonic Youth meets Neil Young. (think Aaron Copland, and bluegrass—Jim played in the bluegrass flatpicking championships in Winfield , Kansas in 1977). It is a sound influenced by Native American, Cowboy and San Francisco sounds. One writer called the Mermen’s sonic signature “the sound of California.”
Joaquín Torres was elected as San Francisco’s Assessor-Recorder on February 15, 2022. Prior to his election, Torres served as the Director of the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development since 2018, and has led citywide efforts to mitigate economic hardships on businesses and workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the years, Torres collaboratively leveraged resources across City departments to create opportunities for all, expand support for small businesses and workers, build capacity and stability for locally rooted nonprofits, and maximize equitable economic and social impact for the benefit of San Franciscan communities, residents, businesses, and neighborhoods. As Director of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, he provided citywide leadership and coordination for workforce development, business development, neighborhood economic development, film, small business, and development planning.
Torres is also the President of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission, chairing the oversight body as the Authority and City implemented a re-envisioning process to rehabilitate over 3,400 units of public housing with $750 million in improvements, leading to the transfer of ownership to affordable housing providers to best serve low-income communities.
Previously, Torres has served as Director the San Francisco Invest in Neighborhoods initiative, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, and Liaison to the San Francisco Latino and American Indian communities and to Supervisorial Districts Nine and Eleven (largely in the Mission and Excelsior neighborhoods).
Torres is committed to Social Justice and Equity. He participated in the inaugural cohort of the City’s Government Alliance for Racial Equity program, which equips leaders with the framework and tools to transform systems and institutions impacting historically marginalized groups. Currently, Assessor Torres serves as President of the Board of Trustees for the American Conservatory Theatre (A.C.T.) and as a member of the Executive Committee and Equity Advisory Council for the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).
Torres is a graduate of Stanford University and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He lives in the Inner Sunset with his wife, Ruibo Qian.
Dr. Clément Vidal is a philosopher passionate about the really big questions, such as the future of humanity, AI, our planet, the universe, ethics, and also the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is co-founder of the “Evo Devo Universe” community and he authored The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective (Springer, 2014). He is currently a visiting researcher at the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center, and a consultant for the non-profit “Human Energy”. He tackles big questions as a philosopher with science, bringing together areas of knowledge such as cosmology, physics, astrobiology, complexity science or evolutionary theory.
Ceara Walton is an educator and youth worker from Oakland, CA. She grew up in West Oakland and was a performing member of the Prescott Circus Theatre while attending Prescott Elementary. She returned to PCT as a junior in high school, as a tutor and class assistant. She also attended Camp Winnarainbow as a camper and later became Teen Staff and a Counselor there. She later advanced to becoming a Leading Teaching Artist, educating many with skills such as African Drumming, Tightwire, Step Dance and Juggling. Since 2004, Ceara has worked as a lead teaching artist at over 15 school sites in and around Oakland, CA. In 2016, she stepped into leadership as PCT’s Summer Program Co-Director and Performing Company Director. Her specialties include West African Stilt Dancing, Hambone body Percussion, Juggling, Hip Hop Dance, and African drumming. Currently, Ceara continues to share her many talents supporting Circus Center’s Community Engagement program, Circus In the City, as a CE Associate and as a Resident Teaching Artist at East Oakland’s Youth Development Center in Oakland.
Lauren Weston — Executive Director Lauren has nearly two decades of leadership experience in fundraising, philanthropy, and advocacy from several well-regarded education nonprofits including the Breakthrough Collaborative, Hiller Aviation Museum, and the YMCA. Her expertise lies in team building, infrastructure, and program design and scale. Her passion is building capacity and finding resources for her teams to be successful in their own areas of expertise. Lauren is an alumna of New York University, where she received her master’s degree in Fundraising and Philanthropy and the University of California–Davis with a Bachelor’s in International Relations with a focus on African American Studies. Lauren is a trained Climate Reality Project leader, having graduated in the summer of 2020 and is a Senior Fellow for the nationwide Environmental Leadership Program.
Trumpeter/composer Sarah Wilson has performed her music at Willisau Jazz Festival, SFJAZZ, Monterey Jazz Festival, Healdsburg Jazz Festival and Celebrate Brooklyn. With commissions from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Center for Cultural Innovation, SF Arts Commission, Fleishhacker Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, East Bay Community Foundation & SF Musical Grant Program, her community-based music projects include Tenderloin Voices with SF’s Tenderloin Museum and Larkin Street Youth Services and Off the Walls, a de Young Museum music and aerial dance production.
Dan Wolf is a hip-hop artist who works with rap, theater, personal narrative, and history to give voice to the problematic world we live in. His projects have traveled all around the world from concert halls to museums to schools and memorial sites where he engages history and culture as a prompt to make vital music and theater that can only live in this moment. He is the Artistic Director of Sound in the Silence and the co-founder of the Bay Area Theatre Cypher.
Şerife Wong is a Turkish-Hawaiian artist working on AI governance. She is the founder of Icarus Salon, an art and research organization exploring the ethics of emerging technology.
She has been a resident on artificial intelligence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, a research fellow at the Berggruen Institute, and was selected as one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021. She serves on the board of directors for Digital Peace Now, is a member of Tech Inquiry, and is an affiliate of O’Neil Risk Consulting and Algorithmic Auditing. She frequently collaborates with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Versatile multi-instrumentalist Mark Yee began on piano and saxophone at a young age. As a former member of the Louisiana Love Act horn section, Mark has had the pleasure of sharing the stage with local luminaries such as Melvin Seals (Jerry Garcia Band), Pete Sears (Jefferson Starship), Greg Anton (Zero), Matt Malley (Counting Crows), as well as Jimmy Vivino (Conan O’Brien band leader). A Bay Area native, Mark currently lives in San Francisco.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronics, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), and the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Dorothea Tanning Award, the Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. www.pamelaz.com
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.