Jonathan Pacheco Bell
Jonathan (@c1typlann3r) is an urban planner in Los Angeles County with over 12 years of experience in zoning enforcement. He researches, writes and speaks about informal housing, unorthodox community outreach, and South Central Los Angeles history from his unique, embedded planning perspective. A product of the California public school system from kindergarten to graduate school, Jonathan holds an M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and an MLIS from SJSU iSchool.
Rachel Brahinsky
Rachel is an urban geographer and an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco, where she directs the Graduate Program in Urban & Public Affairs. Her scholarship focuses on race and justice in cities, particularly in California. She is the co-author of A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area (forthcoming 2019 from UC Press), and she is working on a book that investigates the historical geography of race and real estate, tentatively titled The Story of Property: Race & Urban Change in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dania Cabello
Dania is a sports activist and educator. She designs and facilitates learning experiences using critical thinking, self-reflection, empathy, and practiced persistence by integrating her expertise in sports with liberatory design and systems design. She draws on ten years as an educator in Oakland Unified School District, 20 years as a sports coach, a former professional athlete and academic.
Luisa Caldas
Luisa Caldas is Professor in the Department of Architecture, and the founder and director of the XR Lab – Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on user experience, narrative and storytelling, and the use of immersive environments for building design and simulation. She is a member of the Center for Augmented Cognition at UC Berkeley, and of the HTC Center for Enhanced Reality. Luisa Caldas has also been active for more than twenty years in the field of sustainable design and green building, both in academia and as an energy consultant for large commercial buildings.
Jose Campos
José is the Manager of Planning and Design Review at the San Francisco Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, aka the Successor Agency to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. In his current role, he oversees design review, environmental review and planning for redevelopment project areas in San Francisco. José was the Planning Division Manager at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, Director of Citywide Planning at the San Francisco Planning Department, and Secretary General of the Association of Mediterranean Cruise Ports. He holds a BA in Urban Studies and Planning from the University of California at San Diego and, as a National Urban Fellow, a Master in Public Administration from Baruch College, City University of New York.
Chris Carlsson
Carlsson co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, and frequent public speaker. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson was one of the co-founders of Critical Mass in San Francisco, which not only led to the boom in bicycling locally but spread across the planet and has been the incubator for transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. Since its inception in 1995, Shaping San Francisco has grown into a multi-faceted project consisting of an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and more than a decade of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org).
Theo Ellington
Theo is a San Francisco native and resident of the Bayview Neighborhood. Theo earned a mayoral appointment to serve as Commissioner for the San Francisco Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, where he lead the creation of 1,042 homes, including 242 for formerly homeless families. Theo also served on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, where he defended anti-discrimination policies and protected the city’s most vulnerable populations. Then, as the Director of Public Affairs for the Golden State Warriors, Theo worked to create over 3,000 good paying jobs and help lead the organization philanthropy efforts in San Francisco. In addition e spearheaded public policy initiatives around transportation, workforce development, and quality of life. He obtained his Masters in Urban Affairs from the University of San Francisco.
LisaRuth Elliott
LisaRuth Elliott co-directs Shaping San Francisco—a participatory public history project administering the digital archive at Foundsf.org. Actively preserving community memory through public programming and archival work, she also produced San Francisco History Days at the Old U.S. Mint. She is an editor, researcher, writer, and educator. LisaRuth is also an urban farmer, visual and textile artist, everyday bicyclist, and bread-u-cator. She has worked, studied, and done disaster recovery internationally.
Heather Escandon
Heather Escandon is our guide for the virtual reality experience Real Refuge. She was born in Michigan and just celebrated her 30th birthday. Heather lives at the City Hope Home and works at a nearby Panera Bread. She is in recovery and on a journey to reunite with her daughter.
Sharon Grewal, AICP
Sharon has more than a decade of experience in environmental and land use planning at a local and state level fostering wise land use decisions to conserve agricultural land and mineral resources. Currently, she is a long-range planner for Alameda County and is serving as the Northern Section Director.
Oscar Guerra
Dr. Oscar Guerra is an Emmy® award-winning director, researcher, and educator. He is currently a tenure-track assistant professor at San Francisco State University. His career spans the spectrum of television environments, music, multimedia production, documentaries for social change, promotional video, 360° video production, and vast international experience.
Hamilton Henson
Hamilton is a filmmaker who lives in San Francisco with his wife. He doesn’t have kids or pets, but he hopes you will find him relatable anyway. His work can be found at hamiltonhenson.com.
Jeffrey Hou
Professor Hou is the University of Washington Landscape Architecture Department Chair at the University of Washington and has taught at the department since 2001. In a career that spans across the Pacific, Professor Hou has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, and fishers in Taiwan, neighborhood residents in Japan, villagers in China, and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North America. He has edited, co-edited and co-authored books including “Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities” (2010), “Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia” (2016) and “City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy” (2017).
Yang Liu
As a 3D interactive engineer and a new media artist, Yang Liu is exploring the paradigm and possibilities of immersive interactions in VR, AR and future video games. He previously worked at Oculus, and is currently using his talents at thatgamecompany. His past work includes tools to plan drone trajectory in VR/AR, immersive experience of walking in a city, and photography and sound recording tools.
Vero Majano
Vero Majano is a queer Latina artist born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her works are steeped in film, performance, visual culture, and storytelling. She works to archive, curate, reinterpret, and re-historicize Latino culture in San Francisco’s Mission District for broad audiences to stake out complex stories of the Mission in the City’s memory and history. She is part of The Caca Colectiva, and is cofounder of Mission Media Archives, which collects and preserves audio and films shot in San Francisco’s Mission district during the 1970s and ’80s. The full-length version of her latest work, “Remember Los Siete” will premier in 2019.
Paige Miller
Paige serves as Communications Officer at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. She is dedicated to engaging the public around environmental issues, and previously worked in communications roles at NextGen America, Sanford, and the San Francisco Department of the Environment. Paige keeps involved with her local community and previously served as Chair of the GoGeary transportation advocacy group and as a board member with the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Environmental Network. A proud banana slug, Paige holds a degree in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz.
John Moody
John is a filmmaker, planner and designer currently based in Los Angeles. He is focused on using creative media to understand people’s lived experiences and help them reimagine their physical environment. He works as a digital imaging technician on the set of films and TV shows, including four seasons on Fox’s New Girl, and holds a master’s degree in city planning from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He recently co-founded Invisible Cities Studio, a collaborative organization that helps people plan and design cities using visual storytelling.
Lorraine Morland
Lorraine is a healer, spiritual director, and musician from Los Angeles. At the age of 30 she was gainfully employed and busy raising four children, but a toxic marriage forced her into eight years of homelessness on the streets of downtown L.A. On October 6, 1994, a nun from Good Shepherd Center refused to let Lorraine spend one more night outside and sent her on a path toward sobriety, self-sufficiency, and a happy marriage to the late photographer Chris Morland. Lorraine never passes up a chance to share her story in the hope that it might help someone. She is an advocate for Women Against Gun Violence, sings in the group Urban Voices, and can often be found walking her dog Mercy in Pershing Square. She hopes to visit San Francisco soon to revisit the spot where she and Chris spent their honeymoon.
Ed Nitri
Ed is a Bay Area based writer, photographer and filmmaker. Born in New York to Ghanaian parents, Ed initially studied finance before settling in the Bay Area and receiving an MFA in creative writing at Mills College. In addition to working as a screenwriter and copywriter, his photography has been featured in Vice Magazine, WaxPoetics, Huffington Post, Oakland Museum of CA and the Berkeley Art Museum.
Serginho Roosblad
Serginho is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and photographer. He currently lives in Oakland, California, right next to the subject of his documentary film, the MacArthur Maze. He hails from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with roots in the Caribbean and South America. Prior to living in the U.S., he lived in Uganda, where he lived and worked as a freelance correspondent. He holds a Masters of Journalism degree from UC Berkeley, where he was the Marlon T. Riggs fellow in documentary filmmaking. He also holds a Masters of Philosophy degree in African studies from the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the Hogeschool Utrecht (the Netherlands).
Niki Selkin
Niki Selken 🏻
is an artist, technologist and educator. Her work focuses around storytelling, games and interaction design. She is the Creative Development Lead at in the Gray Area where she manages the artist incubator and creative code education programs. She founded the Emoji Foundation, created the Emoji Dictionary, and VR game EmojiFlower VR. Niki attributes her intuitive understanding of the translation and meaning of Emoji to her extensive Japanese stationery collection and study of Japanese Butoh and Noh theater. Niki’s design and Emoji work has been featured by Yahoo Tech, Adafruit, Buzzfeed and M
Avni Shah
Avni is a San Francisco based architect who designs affordable housing and schools across the Bay Area. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 2015, she received the William and Neoma Timme Urbanism Fellowship to investigate the broken promises of mega-events such as the World Cup and the Olympics. Her short documentary White Elephants specifically looks at the lessons and legacies from South Africa’s 2010 World Cup.
Adam Osfield Snell
Adam Osfield Snell is an independent virtual reality filmmaker. Over the past three and a half years he has worked with major brands—professional sports teams, universities, television studios, corporations, musicians—to better understand this new medium and create VR experiences together. He developed his passion for storytelling working for four years as the Assistant Director of City Hope, a non-profit in San Francisco. Adam loves to use his technical and creative expertise in VR to demonstrate the power of the technology and ways to use it to improve our city and world.
Reverend Paul Trudeau
Rev. Paul Trudeau is founder and executive director of City Hope San Francisco. City Hope’s mission is to cultivate healthy relationships that encourage and empower our neighbors in the Tenderloin to achieve their personal goals, breaking the cycle of addiction, incarceration and isolation in our city. City Hope works in three main program areas: the City Hope Community Center, the City Hope House (a two year transitional sober living home), and a mentoring program in the San Francisco County Jail that combats recidivism by preparing inmates as returning citizens.
Robert Ungar
Robert is an urban designer and architect who moved to Oakland from Tel-Aviv in 2017. He completed his Master in Urban Design at UC Berkeley where his research focused on community land ownership and its potential for sustainable urban development, based on land trust models developed by social movements in Israel in the early 20th century. Robert studied and taught in the Dept. of Architecture in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, did art, volunteered, built gardens and worked in market research until realizing his happiest moments occur in public places. In 2013, Robert co-founded ONYA Collective, an award-winning, not-for-profit group of 15 activists, designers and eco-friendly architects based in South Tel-Aviv. ONYA works with community organizations, municipalities and art institutions to design, grow and build wholesome, inviting places for people to come closer to nature and to one another.
Pamela Uzzell
Pam is an award-winning documentary producer, director and editor. Her feature-length documentary, Unearthing the Dream, featured on Arkansas Public Television as part of their independent producer series, won Best Documentary at the Arkansas Black Independent Film Festival, as well as an Indie Award of Merit. A graduate of Brown University, with an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University, Uzzell has also worked on over twenty feature films in post-production, including Godfather III, Terminator 2, and Dead Poets’ Society. Welcome to the Neighborhood was recently featured on KQED’s Truly CA and won the Grand Festival Award at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival. Uzzell is a member of the Deep East Art Collective.
Angela Washington
Angela is a Monroe, Louisiana mother of two began her career in the late 80s as a reporter for the Gannet News Service, cutting her teeth on the police beat before settling into courts and investigative features, at the News Star World. After moving to San Francisco Angela settled into the world of post-production and advertising for Fleet Street Pictures, where she helmed work for clients like Levi’s, Honda, Taco Bell, Sony and Clorox. Following her role in advertising she hosted her own talk show, The Simple Truth. She is currently CEO of her own event consulting business, A Simple Affair.
Keith Wilson
Keith Wilson is a filmmaker and artist based in San Francisco whose films have been exhibited at Sundance, the Berlinale, South by Southwest and the United States National Gallery of Art. He is a 2018 BAVC National Mediamaker Fellow for his in-progress film DEEP INSIDE THE SHAMAN’S DEN about the life and legacy of performance artist Frank Moore. Keith is a member-owner of New Day Films, has an MFA in film production from the University of Texas-Austin, and grew up on a cul-de-sac deep in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.
Winnie Wong
Winnie is an independent producer in the narrative short film, music video, commercial, documentary, and lifestyle space. She is committed to working with conscientious individuals, companies and organizations on creative projects that reflect the events and topics that move us. She is also committed to incorporating diversity and inclusion clauses when commissioned for her work.
Lily Yu
Lily is a youth education advocate and filmmaker. Lily served as a co-op member at the Echo Park Film Center and worked as a teaching artist for high school students throughout Los Angeles. She graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Film/Video, a minor in Cultural Studies, and a focus on arts education and pedagogy. Currently, she works at a youth arts center in East Palo Alto. Her interests include art curation and analog filmmaking.
