PANELISTS & PERFORMERS

PANELISTS

TELL THEM WE WERE HERE:

Griff Williams is an American painter, publisher and gallerist. In 1993 he founded Gallery 16 and the pioneering fine art printmaking workshop Urban Digital Color in San Francisco. The exhibition and publishing program has worked with hundreds of artists including Lynn Hershman Leeson, William Kentridge, Deborah Oropallo, Jim Isermann, bell hooks, Rex Ray, Margaret Kilgallen, Mark Grotjahn, Paul Sietsema, Arturo Herrera, Michelle Grabner, and Ari Marcopoulos. Williams has also designed and published dozens of acclaimed books with the Gallery 16 Editions imprint. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums including the San Diego Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and the San Jose Museum of Art. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Flash Art, and ARTnews. He co-directed Tell Them We Were Here with his son, Keelan Williams, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles.

René de Guzman is a longtime Bay Area curator, artist, and arts consultant. He was one of the founding curators at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as Visual Arts Curator and Director of Visual Arts, serving from 1993-2007, and subsequently served as the Senior Curator of Art and Director of Exhibition Strategy at the Oakland Museum of California from 2007-21. He also served as Deputy Director for Programs and Engagement at Headlands Center for the Arts, overseeing artist residencies and public programs. For more than three decades, he has developed innovative and popular exhibitions for a wide public and is currently Co-Director of Art + Water in San Francisco.

Amy Franceschini is an artist whose work facilitates encounter, exchange, and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the “certainties” of a given time or place where a work is situated. In 1995, Franceschini founded Futurefarmers as a collaborative platform to consider the social, political, and environmental organization of space. Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation, education … Through this disassembly they find new narratives and reconfigurations that form alternatives to the principles that once dominated these systems. Franceschini received her BFA in Photography from San Francisco State University and an MFA from Stanford University. She has taught in the visual arts graduate programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Stanford University and in the Master of Eco-Social Design at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy. She is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow and a 2017 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts.

Tucker Nichols is an artist based in Northern California. His work has been featured at the Drawing Center in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, Den Frie Museum in Copenhagen, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. A show of his sculpture, Almost Everything On The Table, was recently on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. His drawings have been published in McSweeney’s, The Thing Quarterly, The New Yorker, and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He is co-author of the books, Crabtree (with Jon Nichols) and This Bridge Will Not Be Gray (with Dave Eggers). Flowers for Sick People, his ongoing multimedia project, was featured on the PBS Newshour and the subject of an exhibition at SFMOMA, Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis, is an exhibition highlighting seven local artists’ responses to the pandemic. He is represented by ZieherSmith in New York and Gallery 16 in San Francisco.

CIRCUS BY THE BAY:

Gypsy Snider is co-artistic director of Dear San Francisco, now celebrating its fifth anniversary at the city’s historic Club Fugazi. As co-founding artistic director of The 7 Fingers, she wrote and directed SisterS, Réversible, Intersection, Amuse, Un Dia, Traces, and Loft. She has choreographed televised feature performances for America’s Got Talent and Her Majesty’s Royal Variety Performance. In 2013, working with director Diane Paulus on a new vision of Pippin, she created choreography and wove circus into the revival of the Broadway musical, earning her a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Snider began her circus career at the age of four when her parents founded The Pickle Family Circus. She grew up touring the West Coast with the company. In 2002, while in her hometown of San Francisco, she wrote and directed for The New Pickle Circus a show entitled Circumstance, which premiered at FMCAC’s Cowell Theater. Snider is also a guest teacher and guest director at the National Circus School of Montreal.

Shana Carroll is co-artistic director of Dear San Francisco, and co-founding artistic director of The 7 Fingers. Since the latter’s inception in 2002, Shana has directed, written, and created choreography for a dozen or so of their touring and/or resident shows, including Passagers, Cuisine & Confessions, Séquence 8, and Traces. in 2024 Carroll was co-choreographer and Circus Designer for Water For Elephants on Broadway, for which she received the Chita Rivera Award for Best Choreography, as well as Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circles nominations in the same category. Carroll has frequently collaborated with Cirque du Soleil, most recently as co-director of their first show on ice, Crystal, and previously as acrobatic designer and choreographer of Paramour (Broadway) and Iris (Los Angeles), and as director/choreographer of their performance at the 2012 Academy Awards. Originally from Berkeley, CA, and daughter of beloved San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll, Shana began her career as a trapeze artist with San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus and went on to a 20-year career in the air with Cirque du Soleil and many others before co-founding The 7 Fingers.

Jeff Raz has performed nationally and internationally for decades, starring in the Pickle Family Circus, Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo, Make*A*Circus, and many other circuses and theaters. Jeff is also a playwright, director, teacher, producer and has authored four books inspired by his career. Over the years he has also co-founded six arts organizations and worked globally as a communications and leadership consultant.

Tandy Beal is a performer, director, choreographer, writer, teacher, and … dreamer. An off-the-map career includes: directing Pickle Family Circus for 10 years; touring four continents with Tandy Beal & Co.; writing/directing VIVA for the Moscow Circus in Japan; a show for NASA’s SETI project with Carl Sagan; projects with Lou Harrison, Frank Zappa, John Adams, and decades of projects with Bobby McFerrin, Art Lande, and Jon Scoville; choreographing opera, MTV, ballet; corporate shows (LucasFilms, SF 49ers, MCI, Coca-Cola, Pixar, Oracle+); acting off-Broadway; dancing for the Shah of Iran with Alwin Nikolais in Tehran; guest performances with Atlanta Ballet, Momix, Remy Charlip and in Europe, with Carolyn Carlson; creating what Dance Magazine said was the first contemporary dance/circus Nutcracker. Her life and work are featured in two books, The Pickle Clowns and Living Happily Ever After. She has received awards from AFI, CAC, NEA, Packard, and Hewlett +. Her natural habitat is the Santa Cruz mountains where she lives with longtime co-conspirator, Jon Scoville.

PANELISTS

LIFE ON THE WATER: A REUNION:

Ellen Sebastian Chang is a distinguished multidisciplinary director, dramaturge, writer, and arts educator with a career spanning 50 years, dedicated to advocating for human rights and understanding through the creative arts. She has collaborated with a diverse array of artists and art forms: theater, opera, dance, radio, film and installation.

Sebastian Chang commenced her career as a lighting technician and designer before making her debut as a director and writer in 1982 with Your Place Is No Longer With Us, an immersive play staged in private homes about a biracial girl.

She co-founded LIFE ON THE WATER (LOTW), a notable producing organization in San Francisco, and served as its co-artistic director. During her time at LOTW she created The Sanctified Church with Luisah Teisch, later renamed Sanctified with Esther Scott, No Trace of the Blonde with Holly Hughes, and Janie Geiser, FACE with Bob Ernst, Artis Fountaine, NAO, and Debora Iyall. She has been the creative director and teaching artist for The World As It Could Be Human Rights Education Program, utilizing the arts to deepen understanding of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and inspire activism across generations. Beyond her work in theater, she co-owned the award-winning FuseBOX restaurant in West Oakland created with Chef Sunhui Chang. She has received numerous grants and fellowships from prestigious arts foundations such as Creative Capital, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, MAP Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, and Ruth Arts Fellowship. Her current focus is rewilding six acres of land in the Pacific Northwest planting 1,350 native trees with foresters Boots on the Ground.

William Talen grew up in small towns throughout Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, and came west in the 70s, joining the poetry community in Bolinas, CA before moving to North Beach. Exploring storytelling techniques with solo shows in the Eureka Theater and Intersection, he studied with Spalding Gray and Sidney Lanier. Talen then partnered with Ellen Sebastian, and in 1984 they dreamed of a radical kind of theater, inspired by the stage sets of restaurants and the parties of Anon Salon, eventually lifting “Life on the Water” from a billboard in front of a yuppie apartment complex in Richmond, CA. Gathering with Joe Lambert and Leonard Pitt, LOTW kicked off with six weeks of Gray in the fall of ’86. After seven years, Talen departed for New York, leaving the Solo Mio Festival to Marcia Crosby, Joegh Bullock, and Kate Boyd. In New York and Europe, his character “Reverend Billy” caught a wave of post-religious spiritual hunger, inventing the movement against Consumerism by the time of 9/11. With director and life partner Savitri D, daughter Lena Nightstar, and a revolving troupe of 30 singers, the “Church of Stop Shopping” staged earth services at a series of NYC “art churches” and toured shows on five continents, always returning to justice campaigns in New York. In 2016, Neil Young and Daryl Hannah proposed that Talen preach his “Earthalujah” gospel at the opening of each show, which kicked off a 10-year collaboration, performing in 35 amphitheaters and reaching about 650,000 in Young’s rock audiences. Currently, the Stop Shopping Church has settled in the 500-seat Quaker Meetinghouse in Manhattan, the anti-consumerism of its early days now centered on the Earth’s crisis. Talen’s books include The Earth Wants You from City Lights, and now his fifth book, Earthalujah!, being published in November by Autonomedia Press.

Leonard Pitt studied mime in Paris with Etienne Decroux for four years, becoming his assistant and performing in his company. On his return to the U.S., Pitt settled in Berkeley, CA, where he opened a school of physical theater, attracting students from around the world. Pitt’s one-man shows have received critical acclaim. He has performed and taught at theaters and festivals throughout the U.S., Europe, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia. He was also a member of George Coates Performance Works and traveled widely with the company. In Bali he studied mask theatre and performed extensively with his teacher. In 1986, he co-founded LOTW, where his projects included the “avant-mime” production Not for Real (created with Rinde Eckert), Spleenix, The Art of Face, and performing David Barth’s solo play, Ned. In 1991, Leonard created Eco-Rap, an environmental education program combining ecology and rap music as a way to educate inner city youth about urgent social issues. He has written and published seven books, including three books on Paris and a memoir, and created numerous videos on Paris, all viewable on YouTube (Leonard Pitt Paris). He continues to live in Berkeley and create and is currently working on two new books.

Joe Lambert is the founder of StoryCenter and the originator of the digital storytelling movement, a participatory media methodology used by 100,000s of people all over the world. The work has taken him and his organization to all 50 U.S. states, and more than 90 countries. Earlier in his career, he served as Executive Director of the People’s Theater Coalition and LOTW, where he executive-produced more than 500 performances, festivals, conferences, and national gatherings. Highlights include the first San Francisco Jazz Tap Festival, collaborations with artists like Guillermo Gomez Peña, the Blue Man Group, Marty Pottenger, and Dana Atchley. During that time, he held leadership roles in national initiatives including the Alliance for Cultural Democracy and the National Performance Network, and served as a panelist and principal consultant for numerous public agencies and private foundations. As an author and curriculum developer, he has written numerous articles. For projToday, based in Santa Fe, NM, he continues this work through StoryHost LLC, teaching workshops, hosting the Elderware podcast, and exploring the intersections of story, aging, and meaning-making.

PERFORMERS

CIRCUS BY THE BAY:

Unique Derique, an internationally acclaimed entertainer, is a cornerstone of the Bay Area circus and performing arts scene. He honed his physical comedy with premier troupes including Circus A La Mode, Make*A*Circus, and the historic Pickle Family Circus. Dedicated to community arts education, Derique has spent nearly three decades as an Artist-in Residence at West Oakland’s Prescott Circus Theater, teaching youth the art and history of Hambone body percussion. His versatile talent has graced international television and stages worldwide, opening for legends like Lou Rawls, Sammy Davis Jr., and The Temptations. Annually, his holiday show Fool La La: Whimsical brings joy to all ages at The Marsh Berkeley.

Elise Hing, born and raised in Santa Cruz, CA, discovered her natural flexibility at age 12 and quickly developed a passion for contortion. For the past five years she has performed with Circus Bella doing free shows in the park during the summer and under the big top in the winter for their holiday spectacular. She has also appeared with Flynn Creek Circus and continues to gig all over the bay area. Hing loves to connect and delight audiences through her playful, awe-inspiring shapes and movements but outside of the ring she enjoys being out in nature with friends and pursuing creative projects like sewing.

Chloe Somers Walier, known as the “Megawatt Smile,” is an effervescent circus performer with eight years of international touring experience with Les 7 Doigts de la main, performing in Passengers, Duel Reality, and Dear San Francisco. A multidisciplinary performer specializing in hula hoop, trapeze, group acrobatics, and bottle walking – balancing in heels on top of wine bottles – she has performed at three international circus festivals and received the People’s Choice Award from Riga Cirks. With a love for the unexpected and a playful spirit at the heart of her work, she brings a warm, joyful energy to the stage, blending technical skill and theatricality with a little bit of sparkle and a lot of personality.

San Francisco Youth Circus (SFYC) performers are part of Circus Center’s pre-professional youth program.

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