Executive Staff
Elizabeth Travelslight – Born in Daly City, CA and raised in San Francisco, Elizabeth calls upon many years of local community organizing and non-profit arts program management experience to provide administrative, operational and programmatic direction for the Bay Area Society for Art & Activism. Elizabeth cut her teeth as both an artist and activist at the University of California Santa Cruz where she received both a MFA from the Digital Arts|New Media Program and a BA in Mathematics. From 2000-2008, Elizabeth worked as a member of Rainbow Grocery Cooperative where she served on the Board of Directors and as a founding member of the Anti-Oppression Working Group. Her studio art practice followed the completion of a MA in Media & Communication through the European Graduate School. Elizabeth has worked as a teaching artist with hundreds of Bay Area middle and high school students and she continues teaching at the California College of the Arts, Department of Critical Studies and for IAFS (it’s a free school).
Dorothy Santos – Dorothy is a writer, editor, and curator whose research areas and interests include new media and digital art, programming, the internet of things, augmented reality, online performance, gaming, open source culture, and political aesthetics. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco, and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She currently serves as an editor for the new asterisk magazine, Hyphen, and The Civic Beat. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Hyperallergic, and Public Art Dialogue. She has lectured and spoken at the de Young museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, School of Visual Arts, and San Francisco Art Institute. She serves as a board member for the SOMArts Cultural Center.
Lucia Ippolito – Mission District native, Lucia is a Mexican-American artist, teacher, and activist. As a painter she focuses on cultural/political themes in oil paint. As a muralist she created the Mission Makeover Mural in San Francisco’s Balmy Alley (the largest and most controversial mural in the alley), as well as a 5′ x 5′ tile mural for a youth organization in the Dheisheh Refugee camp in Palestine. Lucia has also assisted several Bay Area artists with their murals including Juana Alicia’s La Llorona, Daniel Galvez’s Carnaval, and Jos Sances’ Castro Valley Library Mural. She has a collection of political posters in the Library of Congress and has exhibited in various group art shows in galleries such as the Diego Rivera Gallery, Alley Cat Bookstore, and Tower Records. After studying at schools such as Oxbow, Chicago Art Institute, and graduating from City College of San Francisco and San Francisco Art Institute, she hopes to further her art and teaching career by counseling youth through the use of political and expressive art.
Josh Southern is an entrepreneur and tech factotum. He is currently working with startups in the music, information technology, and advertising industries.
Advisory Council
Chip Lord – Chip Lord is an artist who works with video and photography. As a member of the collaborative Ant Farm [1968-1978], he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the Cadillac Ranch sculpture in Amarillo, Texas. His media work straddles documentary and experimental genres, often mixing the two, and has been shown widely at film and video festivals and in museums. In 2005 a retrospective of his video work was shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arts Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. In 2011 he completed a public video art piece for the remodeled Bradley Terminal at LAX Airport titled To & From LAX. He is Professor Emeritus in Film & Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz.
Elizabeth Donoghue – For over fifteen years, Elizabeth Donoghue has been working to support democratic, sustainable models of community that are rooted in anti-oppression models of collaboration. As a member of the collectively-run Anti-Oppression Working Group formed at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative, she worked with others to integrate the ideals and pragmatics of democracy, diversity, equity and justice in cooperatives and collectives in the Bay Area and across the United States. Elizabeth is also a somatically-trained psychotherapist who works with groups and individuals on how to heal from the personal and community effects of systemic oppression. As an Advisory Council member, Elizabeth offers her unique perspective and experiences in democratic practice and sustainable collaboration to guide the Bay Area Society for Art & Activism’s Sustainable Workplaces & Collaborations: Consulting Services.
Eric Talbert – Eric Talbert works at San Francisco State University supporting the humanities within the College of Liberal and Creative Arts. In 2012, Eric was honored to received University of Nevada Las Vegas’s College of Liberal Arts Alumnus of the Year Award and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network – San Francisco/Bay Area (YNPNsfba) Young Executive Director of the Year Award. As a founding partner with the Bay Area Society for Art & Activism, Eric greatly appreciates the relationship between art and social justice and is excited to apply his many years of grassroots fundraising experience and human rights activism to its mission.
Katie Anania – Katie Anania is an art historian, curator, and critic whose work has focused on shifting notions of intimacy and privacy since the Cold War. Katie organized the two founding shows for the Bay Area Society for Art & Activism’s Curatorial Partnerships program: Wartime Revival of the Senses at the Rock! Paper! Scissors! Collective in 2012 and Four Core Chambers at the Martina }{ Johnston Gallery in 2014 and is enthusiastic about supporting the Curatorial Partnerships’ experimental platform to showcase the work of local curators and artists to promote the work of the Bay Area’s exceptional social justice organizations. Displaced from the Bay Area since August 2014, she is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Her writing has appeared in Artweek, e-flux, American Craft, Pasteegram, …mightbegood, and Artforum.com.
Leah Weitz – Leah Weitz is a Bay Area native with a heart strengthened by the spirit of San Francisco. She began her journey into the world of art and activism at the age of fifteen when she joined the 3rd Eye Movement, a youth-lead community organizing group housed at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Through 3rd Eye Movement’s efforts to educate and arm the community with tools to advocate for their civil rights, Leah became aware of the connections between education, justice, the sociopolitical system and the power of art to activate, educate and empower the community. Since then, Leah has managed youth programs for Conscious Youth Media Crew and the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center and continues to be actively involved in community-police relations. Presently, Leah is pursuing her passion for photography, cinema and jewelry-design, using folk craft and digital media to inspire her community to become informed and involved in their own personal evolution. She is currently lead photographer and a community organizer for #takingastandsf and at work on a documentary film that tells a very personal story of Filipino immigration, an iPhone and restorative justice.
Leslie Dreyer – Leslie Dreyer is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and educator. She is currently organizing collaborative performance/interventions from within a movement, which demands a right to the city, access to housing, and an end to the commodification of almost every aspect of our lives. Recent projects, both on and off the street, spotlight the tech boom’s impact on displacement and wealth disparity in the Bay Area, alongside other implications of the industry: surveillance and control of our data and communications. Originally from Texas, Leslie has spent the last five and a half years invested in and accountable to her community in the Bay Area.
Nicole Archer – Nicole Archer researches contemporary art and material culture, with an emphasis in modern textile and garment histories. She also concentrates on critical and psychoanalytic theory, corporeal feminism, and performance studies. Nicole is the Chair of the BA Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, where her teaching explores the relations of politics and aesthetics through critical examinations of style, embodiment, and desire. Her work has appeared in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture and Working for Justice: The L.A. Model for Organizing and Advocacy. She is currently working on a manuscript, entitled A Looming Possibility: Towards a Theory of the Textile, that considers how critical understandings and uses of textiles can challenge and extend poststructuralist theories of the text, while also contemplating the specific ways that ‘the textile’ works to produce and maintain the limits of legitimate versus illegitimate forms of state violence.
Sanaz Mazinani – Sanaz Mazinani is a San Francisco-based visual artist whose work explores the relationship between perception and representation. Working primarily in photography and large-scale photo-based installations, her practice intersects conceptual and formal boundaries of the photographic image in response to site, sight and insight, especially in relation to digital culture. Her work has been exhibited in the Museum Bärengasse, Zürich, the Art & Architecture Library at Stanford University, the University of Toronto Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Sarai, New Delhi, Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, and Emirates Financial Towers in Dubai. Mazinani’s catalogue, Unfolding Images was released in 2012 by Bulger Gallery Press. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission. She was shortlisted for the 2013 Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize and granted the Kala Art Institute Fellowship. In 2013, Mazinani was awarded the SFAC Art on Market Street public art installation. Her artwork has been written about in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, Modern Painters, Nuva Luz, NOW Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, and SFWeekly. Mazinani studied art at the Ontario College of Art & Design University [2003], and received her MFA at Stanford University [2011].
Shizue Seigel – Shizue Seigel explores complex intersections of history, place, culture and spirituality through writing and visual art. She is inspired by her Japanese American family history, and early exposure to economic and cultural diversity. She honed her craft by working as an advertising art director, community health educator, magazine editor, historian and cartographer. Her digital photocollage, maps and mixed media have appeared in solo and group shows locally, nationally and internationally. Her poetry and prose have been published in several anthologies. She authored In Good Conscience: Supporting Japanese Americans During the Internment and did the cartography for three Rebecca Solnit atlas projects, including Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Her papers are collected at UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) and she serves on the Asian American Women Artists Association’s advisory board.
Soumyaa Kapil Behrens – An award winning director, producer and curator of film and contemporary visual art, Soumyaa Kapil Behrens’ work is socially driven, engages issues of the environment and the political landscape that shapes identity and power structures within marginalized communities. Soumyaa is the Social Justice Coordinator for the new Metro Academy in the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University, a lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute and curator of the Reclaimed Room for Environmental Arts. Soumyaa has completed multiple short films that have screened nationwide and produced the feature narrative, Redemption Trail, currently on the festival circuit. She is in post-production on a new documentary that chronicles the city wide gentrification efforts to reduce homeless visibility in the city and forced demise of the oldest community recycling center in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. She also serves on the board of directors at Bona Fide Films, as President of Bay Area Women in Film and Media (BAWIFM) and is a member of SAG-AFTRA. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Drama from Illinois State University and an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University.
