Cyrus has been organizing events around sustainable transportation for the past five years, including the Bay Area Transit Funeral in 2023, and serving as a campaign leader on San Francisco’s Prop L in 2024, a measure that sought to invest in public transit by taxing ride hail companies. He believes that sustainable transportation is not only the key to reaching net-zero emissions, but creates a much happier, more accessible world for all.
David James is a San Francisco-born-and-based composer, guitarist, vocalist, and bandleader who has been a recording and performing member of Spearhead, The Coup, Afrofunk Experience, and the Beth Custer Ensemble, among others. He currently leads the ensemble GPS, which recently released its second album, “Mission Rebel No. 1”.
Bay Area Native Kitten on the Keys has been performing stateside and internationally for 25 years -everywhere from sleazy bars to the award winning French film “Tournee” at the Cannes Film Festival. She can be seen in a variety of piano bars and cabarets throughout San Francisco including The Rite Spot, the Madrone Art Bar, the Royal Cuckoo Market, and annually at Flower Piano. Her songbook is deep and wide. Pianist, accordionist, and singer, she plays a delicious smorgasbord of styles and eras from kitschy cabaret originals to bawdy blues, unexpected covers and forgotten gems of yesteryear.
Jo Kreiter is a choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. She engages physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Her tools include coalition building, an unklikely use of place, an intersectional feminist lens and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity. Via Flyaway Productions, Jo has spent 30 years creating public art with people marginalized by race, class, gender and the criminal legal system.
Duo Gadjo’s music is inspired by the sounds of the 20’s and 30’s, when jazz was
the thing and Paris was the place to be. Their style is generally called ‘French Cafe’
or ‘Gypsy Jazz’ as pioneered by the French Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt
Winemaker and co-owner of Sunset Cellars, PhD biomedical researcher, Fah is moved by how wine coalesces art, chemistry, biology, geology, history and culture. He created #drinkAAPIwine with Asian Wine Professionals, now part of the Asian Wine Association of America (AWAA). As a winemaker, he upholds the style developed by Sunset Cellars’ founders, Doug and Katsuko Sparks, allowing time to tame naturally acidic grapes like Barbera (a flagship wine since 1998) and Petite Sirah, with minimal intervention.
Neal Strickberger builds art fusing technology and extreme illumination – crafting interactive light experiences that surprise and engage.
With Project Flashlight, he reanimated 1960s military battlefield searchlights – used by NASA to illuminate Apollo and Space Shuttle launches – then added interactive participant controls with tablets. The result: pure, searing white “fingers of God” sweeping the darkness, inviting collective joy in light at grand scale.
Bay Area Native Kitten on the Keys aka cabaret artist Suzanne Ramsey has been performing everywhere from sleazy bars to the award winning French film “Tournee” at the Cannes Film Festival. Her songbook is deep and wide. Pianist, accordionist, and singer she plays a panoplie of styles and eras – kitschy cabaret originals, bawdy blues, unexpected covers and forgotten gems of yesteryear.
amara tabor-smith (she/they) was born and raised on Unceded Ramaytush Ohlone territory/ San Francisco, and currently lives in Huichin Ohlone territory/Oakland, CA. She is a choreographer, performance maker, cultural worker, community caregiver, and the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. Her interdisciplinary site-responsive and community specific performance making practice utilizes Yoruba Lukumí spiritual technologies to address issues of social and environmental justice, race, gender identity, and belonging in the Afro NOW. amara’s work is rooted in Black, queer, feminist principles that insist on liberation, joy, home fullness and well-being. amara is currently a teaching artist in residence at Stanford University.
Leyya Mona Tawil is an artist, composer, and cultural activist. She works in dance, sound art and hybrid performance practices. Tawil is Palestinian and Syrian; engaged in the world as such. Her works have toured extensively throughout the states, Europe and the Arab region. Tawil has stewarded TAC Temescal Art Center in Oakland since 1997 and is the founding director of Arab.AMP – a platform for worldbuilding artists from the Arab/SWANA diaspora and our allied communities.
The Mermen play an extreme brand of surf music, the black minor-chord moods of guitarist Jim Thomas are like a rough ride on the icy seas of the mid- Atlantic.
– David Fricke, ROLLING STONE
Jim Thomas builds crashing waves of sound that would do Pink Floyd proud. Thomas’ unique vision has never sounded better than this….. sterling set of tone poems that swell up like the sea itself…the psychedelia dominates….Far from the calculating, cultivated rock so common these days. The Mermen’s Road Show album is a tour de force by and inspired musician following his own vision”
– Joel Selvin ,San Francisco Chronicle
Kristina Wong is a Doris Duke Artist Award winner, Guggenheim Fellow and the first Asian American woman to be named Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama. Notable solo shows include: Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Going Green the Wong Way, The Wong Street Journal, Kristina Wong for Public Office, Kristina Wong for Public Office and Kristina Wong, #FoodBankInfluencer.