ADVISORY COUNCIL
Kim Anno
Marna Braunstein Clark
Betsy Edasery
Mildred Howard
Daniel Nevers
Kelsey Nicholson
Natani Notah
Kathryn Reasoner
Dorothy R. Santos
Board of Directors
Kerri Hurtado, President
Eric Cabunoc, Vice President
Svea Lin Soll, Treasurer
Jess Tschirki, Secretary
Natnael Amare
Galen Melchert
Thet Shein Win
Program committee
Elliot Anderson
Cristine Blanco
champoy
Sergio De La Torre
Jackie Im
Simon Tran
Rochelle Youk
Minoosh Zomorodinia
STAFF
Sun Park, Gallery Manager
Board OF DIRECTORS
Kerri Hurtado, President
Kerri Hurtado is a Principal with Artsource Consulting, a multidisciplinary art advisory company. Prior to Artsource Consulting, she worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in development, and has worked with several nonprofit organizations including Southern Exposure and Capp Street Project. Kerri is a member of the San Francisco council of Artadia and has participated on the San Francisco Arts Education Project Advisory Committee and served as President of the Board of Directors for the San Francisco Cinematheque. She earned a BA in Art Administration from San Francisco State University, where she focused on nonprofit art organizations.
Eric Cabunoc, Vice President
Eric Cabunoc works as the Donor Engagement Manager at Outward Bound, and was previously the Membership Manager at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland and Development Manager for Playworks. He brings extensive experience in logistics and database management to his volunteer experience at Berkeley Art Center. Eric has a BA in Ceramic Arts and Ceramics from California College of the Arts.
Svea Lin Soll, treasurer
Svea Lin Soll has spent twenty-five years working in the art world as a gallery owner, exhibition director, and art consultant. Svea started her career working in community-based nonprofit arts organizations facilitating exhibitions and public programming. She ran her own gallery and studio space that functioned as an experimental platform for contemporary artists working across all mediums and genres. Over the past 10+ years, Svea has helped countless private clients find art for residential, hospitality and corporate spaces. She has spent her career cultivating enduring relationships with artists, marked by sustained collaborations and a shared commitment to supporting creatives in the Bay Area. She is currently the principal of Swarm Projects, an arts agency that offers private art consulting and professional development support for working artists.
Natnael Amare
Natnael Amare is a scientist and change-maker with a strong commitment to fostering creativity and community engagement through the arts. In addition to twenty-three-year career in process engineering in the pharma industry, Natnael is a leader and strategist in Diversity, Equity, and Belonging. He believes in the transformative power of art to inspire us, reflect on our experiences and memories, expand our imagination, and move us to connect with others. Drawing on his experience in building connections amongst global communities, expanding access to life saving medicines; Natnael is dedicated to advancing the center’s mission of promoting artistic expression and cultural dialogue.
Galen melchert
Galen Melchert found his calling in the merger of his technical expertise with his love for art. Currently working in the design-build sector, he collaborates with artists and builders to craft bespoke spaces. With a mechanical engineering degree from CU Boulder, experience in Bay Area startups, and creative expertise across ceramic tile, wood, and digital, he has designed and built multiple large-scale art commissions. His artistic passion has been enriched by a four-year collaboration with his grandfather, renowned artist Jim Melchert. As a third-generation participant in the Oakland and Berkeley art scenes, Galen is not just preserving family tradition, but actively contributing to his community's cultural fabric.
Jess Tschirki
Jessica Tschirki fosters happy, engaged, design-driven teams by emphasizing trust, accountability, and creativity. Jess is interested in learning more about the intersectionality between data and intuition, and how those two elements influence design to create truly delightful, yet utility based interaction models. Her specialties include User Experience, Experience Design, Mobile Apps, Integrated / Campaign Marketing, Brand Marketing, Brand Development, Identity Systems, Environment / Event Design, and Creative Direction.
THET SHEIN WIN
Thet Shein Win (she/her) is a Burmese-American writer, artist, teacher, child of immigrants, and mother. Her training is in visual art (M.F.A. Mills) and cultural anthropology (M.A./Ph.D. Candidate ABD Stanford). Professionally, Thet has exhibited and taught sculpture, curated art exhibitions, written about the brain and developed online courses for a neuroscience startup, and researched and presented academic papers at cultural anthropology conferences. Today, she leads intimate writing circles for BIPOC communities.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Elliot Anderson
Elliot Anderson is an artist working in a wide range of media, including video, sound, computer interaction, animation, and digital imaging. His current research incorporates computer technologies to engage questions about land use and social interventions into the environment. Elliot’s work has been exhibited and performed widely in Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Venues include the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, DC), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), Princeton University Art Museum (New Jersey), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the de Young Museum (San Francisco). His work includes a commissioned large-scale photographic diptych that is a centerpiece for the US Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia. Elliot is associate professor of electronic art, digital arts/new media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Cristine Blanco
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Cristine Blanco is an interdisciplinary artist who works in sculpture, video and installation. Her works take environmental injustices, the precarity of resources, and familial story as her starting point. Inspired by her grandmother’s home in the Philippines, she explores the impact of rising sea levels and considers how human connectivity and adaptation are essential to recovery and transformation. Cristine is a 2020 MFA Mills College graduate. She has exhibited works at Root Division, SOMArts Cultural Center, Depart Foundation, and Slide Space 123. She is the co-founder of Far House Gallery.
champoy
champoy (pronouns THEY/THEM ) was born in the highlands of Bukidnon, a landlocked province in the island of Mindanao which is located in the Southern Philippines. They have been based in the US/Turtle Island since 2002. Their work integrates found and fabricated objects through installation, line, video, and performance with auto-ethnographic elements that play with the complexities that come with being both within and outside of empire. champoy's approach is rooted in being able to locate themself within the historical narratives that define Filipinos as a people. Free play, colonial interrogations, and world-making happen in their improvisations with material and process. They received their MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2021 and is currently a graduate fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Sergio de la torre
As an artist and educator, Sergio De La Torre has worked with and documented the manifold ways by which citizens reinvent themselves in the city they inhabit, as well as site-specific strategies they deploy to move ‘in and out modernity. De La Torre’s work often invokes collaborations with the subjects and invites both intimate and critical reflections on topics related to housing, immigration, and labor, to mention only a few. De La Torre purposely work with individuals from marginalized sectors of the cities he works in, including factory workers (Tijuana), shoeshine boys (Mexico City), undocumented immigrants (Los Angeles and San Francisco), and evicted families (Oakland). In his work De La Torre has tried to approach the lives of these individuals, not as victim-subjects, but have attempted rather to reexamine the meaning of their actions in the context of shifting global conditions. These works have appeared in the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the Bienal Barro de America, Museo de Bellas Artes Caracas, Venezuela; in the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, Cleveland, Ohio; the Atelier Frankfurt, Germany; the Centro Cultural Tijuana; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; the TRIBECA Film Festival, New York; and el Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia. Sergio De La Torre is an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco Art and Architecture Department.
Simon Tran
Simon Tran is a painter from Long Beach who now resides in Menlo Park. He has a BA in art practice from UC Berkeley. Simon is the Artists in Education Coordinator at Southern Exposure. His website is ghostghostteeth.com
Rochelle Youk
Rochelle Youk works across media to craft objects informed by the ways that cultural identity is appropriated and shared on both a global and local level. Current work examines the history between Asia and the United States through the lens of Korean cultural traditions such as folk crafts, and often incorporates the original craft processes used to make them. Her work has been shown at Root Division, Kearny Street Workshop, the Performance Art Institute, and Kala Art Institute, where she was also a recent artist-in-residence. Youk earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has also completed a bookbinding apprenticeship at letterpress publisher Arion Press. She currently works as a freelance bookbinder in addition to her studio practice.
Minoosh Zomorodinia
Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist who makes visible the emotional and psychological reflections of her mind's eye inspired by nature and her environments. Zomorodinia earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and holds a maste’s degree in graphic design and a BA in Photography from Azad University in Tehran. She has received several awards, residences, and grants including the Kala Media Fellowship Award, Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology San Francisco, and the California Arts Council. Minoosh has exhibited locally and internationally.
Staff BIOS
Sun Park, Gallery Manager
Sun Park is a visual artist and writer based in San Francisco. Sun holds an MFA from SFSU, co-founded the SFSU Art Student Union, was a fellow at Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writer’s Fellowship, is a member of the Dong Ji Collective, and has presented work at SFAC Main Gallery, Southern Exposure, and /room/ (slash gallery), among others. Lately, Sun has been performing stand up.