Amber Hasselbring

Amber Hasselbring 2011 Fellow Amber Hasselbring is a San Francisco artist focused on exploring ecological relationships. Since 2004, she has produced collaborative, project-based works that involve participation by invited and circumstantial audiences. Hasselbring’s Mission Greenbelt Project (2007-present) explores themes of gentrification, education and urban ecology through performances and garden building efforts in San Francisco.  The project is an ongoing urban earthwork of sidewalk gardens, planted with California native and other drought-tolerant plants. The gardens attract wildlife, relieve the city’s overburdened water treatment system and encourage volunteerism and cooperation. The proposed route connects Mission District parks and open spaces.

Amy Balkin

Amy Balkin 2010 Fellow Amy Balkin is a cross-disciplinary artist working in San Francisco.  Using a high level of research and social critique, Amy initiates critical conversations about the modern world in which we exist.  Her recent projects include Public Smog, Invisible-5 and This is the Public Domain. Public Smogis a park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale. The park is constructed through financial, legal, or political activities that open it for public use. Activities to create the park have included purchasing and retiring emission offsets in regulated emissions markets and making them inaccessible to polluting industries.When Public Smog is built through this process, it exists in the unfixed public airspace above the region where offsets are purchased and withheld from use. The park’s size varies, reflecting the amount of emissions allowances purchased and the length of contract, compounded by seasonal fluctuations in air quality.  Public Smog opened over California's South Coast Air Quality Management District in 2004, and over the European Union in 2007. Other activities to create Public Smog impact the size, location, and duration of the park. These activities include an attempt to submit Earth’s atmosphere for inscription on UNESCO's World Heritage List. tomorrowmorning.net publicsmog.org

Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art

Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art 2014 - $8,000 Art + Environment Conference  The Center for Art + Environment (CA+E) at the Nevada Museum of Art supports the practice, study, and awareness of creative interactions between people and their environments. The CA+E collects and exhibits archives and artworks from national and international artists and designers who are re-defining what it means to interact with the world around us. The flagship program of the Center for Art + Environment, the triennial Art + Environment Conference, will convene more than 250 international artists, scientists, scholars, designers, and writers for a dialogue that fosters new knowledge in the visual arts and environmental practice at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada. The 2014 conference will focus on themes of posthumanism, geoasthetics and fieldworks, with the goal of inspiring new artworks and scholarship that promote a culture of sustainability manifested through art, architecture, and design. centerforartenvironment.org

Edible City/Andrew Hasse

Exploratorium

The Exploratorium is a LEED-Platinum rated building and the institution is working toward energy neutrality through systems like the solar panels on Pier 15. © Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

The Exploratorium’s Pier 15 and 17 is centrally situated on San Francisco’s Embarcadero Waterfront, with access to public transit, and a working dock for visiting ships of all types.© Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

The Exploratorium welcomes over 800,000 visitors every year, from field trip students to adult After Dark audiences to curious individuals from every walk of life. © Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

The Fisher Bay Observatory is home to many of the incredible environmental programs of the Exploratorium. Among its many incredible exhibits and programs, it houses the Wired Pier—an array of sensitive instruments around the Exploratorium campus that measure and record conditions in the environment—the weather, Bay water, pollution, and more © Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

The entire Exploratorium is a hub of environmental programming—our working dock welcomes NOAA research ships and other vessels, our buoy gathers information year-round, and the Fisher Bay Observatory convenes the leading minds in urban resilience and sustainability. © Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

The Exploratorium’s Gallery 4 is dedicated to Living Systems and is one of the only informal learning institutions in the country with a working wet lab on site. © Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

Exploratorium
2022 - $15,000 Urban Fellows Program
2021 - $15,000 Urban Fellows Program
2019 - $10,000 Coastal Resiliency Collaboration
2019 - $10,000 General Support
2018 - $10,000 Urban Fellowship
2017 - $10,000 Urban Fellowship
2017 - $10,000 Habitat: Bay As It Is Symposium
2016 - $5,000 Habitat: Bay As It Is Symposium
2016 - $10,000 Urban Fellowship
2015 - $10,000 Urban Fellowship
2015 - $10,000 Center for Art and Inquiry
2014 - $10,000 Urban Fellowship
2013 - $10,000 Jane Wolf, Bay Lexicon
2013 - $1,000 Living Innovation Zone
2011 - $10,000 Capital Campaign

Since 1969, the Exploratorium’s museum in San Francisco has been home to a renowned collection of 650+ exhibits that draw together science, art, and human perception, and that have changed the way science is taught. Our award-winning programs inspire visitors, empower teachers through our cutting-edge teacher development program, and influence a global movement where 80% of science centers across the globe contain Exploratorium exhibits. The exhibits on the floor are designed to enable experimentation with physical phenomena while simultaneously strengthening thinking and inquiry skills. This is true not only for our audiences of over 850,000 people a year in San Francisco, but for an estimated 250 million people who experience our exhibits at science centers around the world. As founder Frank Oppenheimer saw it: “A lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world they give up with the social and political world as well. If we stop trying to understand things, I think we’re all sunk.” The Exploratorium continues to build on his foundational belief that citizens who are curious and empowered to learn about the world are more likely to take action and tackle problems in their communities.

The Exploratorium’s location on Piers 15 and 17, and in particular our investment in the Fisher Bay Observatory, has provided an unprecedented opportunity to engage the public with a wealth of data about the area’s natural and built environments and dynamic access to the researchers collecting it. Since our relocation from the Palace of Fine Arts in 2013, we have been continually evolving exhibits, programs, and partnerships to engage diverse audiences in understanding the complex ecologies that emerge through the interaction between social, cultural, and natural forces and systems. The facility serves as a new model for a combined research and learning space—an open laboratory for researchers, policy makers, and the public. We are educators who have learned that as we face global climate crises, our strategy must be expansive including the contributions of scientists, educators, artists, designers, historians and cultural workers, as well as practitioners in the realms of policy and advocacy. 

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Exploratorium closed its doors on March 12, 2020. Our museum has always been a playground of discovery and hands-on learning, but as we remain closed, our educators, exhibit developers, scientists and other staff have gotten creative in sparking curiosity online. From helping teachers make science come alive in virtual classrooms, to engaging families all over the globe in tinkering projects, to illuminating timely science through online events like Covid Conversations and After Dark, the Exploratorium’s online content highlights what the Exploratorium does best: creating learning experiences that are engaging, interactive, inspiring, and trustworthy.

The digital programming and resources reach audiences from young kids to adults, and present a full range of topics from nearly all Exploratorium departments, from biology, to the environment, to Cinema Arts. In all, our digital resources are being used more than ever: traffic to our website, which serves 2M people annually, is up by nearly 300%. The Exploratorium is proud to continue sparking curiosity wherever people are, whether the kitchen table laboratory, the virtual classroom, the outdoors, or—eventually—back at Pier 15

Urban Fellowship
The Exploratorium's new Urban Fellow program will address issues related to climate change and rising sea levels.  This program situates an artist or urban practitioner in a residency within the Bay Observatory to explore the human relationship to the urban environment.  Fellows could explore concrete forms: such as architecture and infrastructure: as well as human forms: such as approaches to planning or individual practices within the city.  This investigation is both important and timely as urban areas globally explore the issue of climate change and coastal resiliency.

Jane Wolf, Bay Lexicon
Bay Lexicon is an illustrated field guide to San Francisco’s shoreline. Using methods and tools from landscape scholarship, design, and science education, Bay Lexicon aims to encourage observation and enquiry about the natural world and its relation to culture.

exploratorium.edu

Friends of the Gateway

Friends of the Gateway 2011 - $7,500 General Support Friends of The Gateway (FOG) is a community of artists and innovators championing the creation of a unique public space at the foot of the new Bay Bridge. Using the arts as the organizing principle, the Gateway Park envisioned will integrate engineering, infrastructure, landscape, economic and community development, creating a vibrant regional asset and an international destination.Gateway Park will be located at the touchdown point of eastern span of the Bay Bridge, on the Oakland side, and will encompass at least between 35 and 150 acres. FOG envisions a public space akin to Millennium Park in Chicago or Landschaftspark in Germany, with a comparable economic and social impact, using the arts and the industrial arts movement as the central themes. The East Bay is the international epicenter for a major industrial arts movement, and our hope is that the Gateway will both celebrate this and capitalize upon it. FOG’s vision will seek to integrate human-scaled, social and economic activities into this context using the arts as an engaging vehicle, while creating a vital, vibrant Bay Area arts destination that attracts a local and international audience; explores the relationships between place, structure and creative innovation; and celebrates the remarkable new span of the Bay Bridge.

Friends of the Urban Forest

Friends of the Urban Forest
2023 - $5,000 General Support
2019 - $15,000 General Support
2007 - $10,000 General Support

Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF) promotes a larger, healthier urban forest as part of San Francisco’s green infrastructure through community planting, tree care, education, and advocacy. Each year, FUF helps communities plant nearly 1,000 trees. Neighbors organize the plantings, while FUF obtains permits, removes sidewalk concrete, supplies tools and materials and selects, purchases and delivers the trees. On planting day, FUF volunteers work side-by-side with residents. After the work is done, everyone celebrates over a community lunch.In 1995, FUF formally instituted Tree Care to improve tree health and to increase survival rates - certified arborists, assisted by volunteers and trainees, prune and re-stake existing street trees. Tree Care aims to provide essential maintenance services and to educate neighbors, through mailings and hands-on assistance, on how to care for their trees.  FUF is committed to increasing its resources for Tree Care, which is essential to maintain and enhance the community’s investment in San Francisco’s urban forest.

fuf.net

Futurefarmers/Amy Franceschini

Futurefarmers/Amy Franceschini
2020 - $10,000 FogHouse Project
2017 - $15,000 Seed Journey
2010 - $5,000 Free Soil: Farming 2050 Publication
2007 - $10,000 Victory Garden Project

Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists. In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space.Victory Gardens
Victory Gardens 2007+ calls for a more active role for cities in shaping agricultural and food policy. It is a concept in development with the city of San Francisco that would provide a subsidized home gardening program for individuals and neighborhoods.  This program offers tools, training & materials for urban dwellers to participate in a city-wide transformation of underutilized backyards— turning them into productive growing spaces. The project draws from the historical model of the 1940's American Victory Garden program to provide a basis for developing urban agriculture as a viable form of sustainable food practice in the city.

Farming 2050
The first issue of the annual journal Free Soil, FARMING 2050, documents a one-day experiment where eleven artists, farmers, writers, policy makers, architects and philosophers were invited to imagine farming in 2050. What will it look like and how will we get there? What materialized was a range of apprehensions, evaluations and revelatory combinations of fact and fiction that offer a diverse look on the future of farming. This hyper-local portrait of critical, San Francisco voices reflects a sense of optimism intertwined with serious demands to re-evaluate the current logic that dominates our food system.

futurefarmers.com

Greenhorns

Greenhorns 2012 - $5,000 Seed Circus The Greenhorns is a grassroots non-profit organization made up of young farmers and many collaborators. Their mission is to recruit, promote and support the new generation of young farmers. Using radio, blogs, film, and live events, the Greenhorns build agrarian culture by connecting young farmers with information, land, and each other. America wants more young farmers and more young farmers want a piece of America. We know it will take millions of these rough and ready protagonists of place to care for our ecosystems and serve our country healthy food in the years to come. The Greenhorns enable this critical meeting between minds, bodies, and land by helping young and aspiring farmers to navigate career paths, build skills, and connect with each other. Our multifaceted approach includes on-the-ground organizing of events and workshops, media production, and online coalition building. The Seed Circus is a series of cultural events engages attendees in tactile, sensual, and cacophonous experiences containing elements of country fair, circus, adult education, and child-centered sport as entry points into advocating for an alive and vital farm economy.  Its purpose is to build capacity on farms for functionality and agrarian celebration.  More widely it is meant to trigger greater understanding of the young farmers movement.  It functions as a series of multi-stage performances, interactive work stations, public acts of improvisation, lectures, films, and interpretive agricultural exhibits.   Seed Circus' have taken place in New York and Oakland, CA.  Plans are in the works for a Seed Circus in Washington DC in September 2013. thegreenhorns.net

Headlands Center for the Arts

Headlands Center for the Arts
2015 - $15,000 Climate Change Summit
2012 - $10,000 Architecture/Environment Resident, Mathilde Cassani
2011 - $10,000 Architecture/Environment Resident, Liam Young

Headlands Center for the Arts (HCA) provides intensive residency experiences to an international community of artists working across artistic disciplines. The peer-to-peer learning model made possible by the communal nature of Headlands programs aims to create a dynamic, creative environment that inspires the generation of new ideas, collaboration and new works of art.

HCA supports and invests in individuals at the cutting edge of their fields, whose work will impact the cultural landscape at large. They provide these artists with the support and opportunity to take their work to the next level and to explore and experiment, while bringing artists and thinkers into a dynamic community of local, national, and international artists.

Climate Change Summit
Headlands Center for the Arts is committed to facilitating cross-disciplinary connections in order to seed new projects and collaborations and foster public discourse on a wide range of relevant cultural, social and environmental topics. Over the course of four days in August 2016, fifteen artists, writers, policy makers and scientists were invited to participate in a live/work residency at Headlands where they presented, discussed, and exchanged ideas about many issues pertaining to climate change.  This culminated in a public program summarizing the key ideas, findings and positions local, national and international participants developed during the four day intensive.

headlands.org

ioby

ioby
2014 - $10,000 Crowdfunding Workshop

ioby is a community of donors, volunteers and leaders working together to make their neighborhoods stronger and more sustainable. ioby is a crowd-resourcing digital platform that supports citizen-led, neighbor-funded projects related to food, transit, sharing, public health, public art, environment, schools, tactical urbanism and creative placemaking. For this project, ioby will host an intensive training on grassroots fundraising and crowdfunding for Seed Fund grantees in San Francisco.

www.ioby.org

Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine 2012 Fellow Michael Swaine is an inventor and designer working in many media. His work is collaborative in nature and has been included in exhibitions at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art; and the Exploratorium, San Francisco. He is currently building the Free Mending Library in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco.  It is a library for fixing the holes in our lives—a place to borrow thread and sewing machines and talk about life.  He has been sewing, hemming and mending for free in the Tenderloin on the 15^th of every month since 2001 – the year of his Generosity Project for the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Swaine teaches at California College of the Arts, Mills College and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Rebar

photo credit: Lucy Goodhart 

Rebar
2013 - $5,000 Adaptive Metropolis Symposium
2009 - $10,000 Hayes Valley Farm

REBAR's work encompasses visual and conceptual public art, landscape design, urban intervention, temporary performance installation, digital media and print design. Together with UC Berkeley Department of Landscape Architecture, The Adaptive Metropolis symposium convenes a global community of thinkers and doers to discuss the future of user-generated urbanism. The participation of leading scholars and critics allows authoritative and thorough analysis. The symposium also provides practitioners and theorists with a platform to discuss and share ideas, experiences, knowledge, and skills, creating an up-to-date battlefield map. Lastly, the symposium explores new ways to look at the subject matter, setting the stage for the next phase of its development. http://laep.ced.berkeley.edu/adaptivemetropolis/site/

Hayes Valley Farm (HVF) is a temporary urban permaculture demonstration site in San Francisco. It is a 2.2-acre non-profit community-run farm, urban agriculture education and research project located in the heart of the city of San Francisco.  After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, San Francisco's Central Freeway was compromised and in the years to come the ramps bordered by Laguna, Oak, Fell, and Octavia Streets were closed, and the lot locked up. In January 2010, the City activated the site for temporary green space use, allowing for Hayes Valley Farm to create the space for education and reflection.

Rebar was part of the original team that conceived of, planned, and fundraised to create Hayes Valley Farm. They worked closely with the Mayor’s Office of San Francisco, The Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, the Public Utilities Commission, and the Department of Public Works to open the gates to the formerly vacant lot and bring in essential infrastructure. Rebar partnered with S12 Architects in the design and construction of the farm’s greenhouse, and worked closely with the HVF team to develop the farm’s current logo.

Rebar is a cross-disciplinary practice for solving the design problems of the commons.

rebargroup.org
hayesvalleyfarm.com

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit 2008 Fellow Rebecca Solnit is a writer and activist living in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams,and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era.Solnit has also followed and participated in various revolutions worldwide, including Tiananmen Square, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and the Velvet Revolution.Solnit is the author of thirteen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogues and anthologies. Her books include Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a book of 22 maps and nearly 30 collaborators;  A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; Storming the Gates of Paradise; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, for which she received a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award.She has worked with climate change, Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist. rebeccasolnit.net

Rosten Woo

Rosten Woo 2011 Fellow Rosten Woo is an artist, designer and writer living in Los Angeles. He makes work that helps people understand complex systems and participate in group decision-making. His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the New Museum, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Netherlands Architectural Institute, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; and in various public housing developments, tugboats, shopping malls and parks in New York City and Los Angeles. His first book, Street Valuewas published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. He is co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a nonprofit organization that uses design and art to improve civic engagement. CUP projects demystify the urban policy and planning issues that impact communities so that more individuals can better participate in shaping them. wehavenoart.net

Sam Green

Sam Green 2008 Fellow A renowned documentary film maker, Sam Green points his camera at a broad range of subjects-from a legendary rainbow-wig sign holder, to a intensive overview of the radical protest group “Weather Underground”.  The Seed Fund supported his film project, Fog City, which used a hotline and local call-ins to find and record breathtaking moments of fog in the bay area.  Co-directed by Andy Black, Fog Cityhas been shown at SFMoMA and other local venues. Sam Green currently teaches film and video at San Francisco Art Institute. samgreen.to

San Francisco Art Institute

San Francisco Art Institute
2014 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, to Be Announced in the Fall
2013 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, Pablo Helguera
2012 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, Radhika Subramaniam
2011 - $5,000 Urban Studies Fellow, Geoff Manaugh

Founded in 1871 the San Francisco Art Insitute (SFAI) is one of the nations oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art. Poised at the forefront of socially conscious art movements, SFAI’s Urban Studies program is designed specifically to address the contributions of art, artists, and researchers to the urban domain.The changing dynamics of cities—most notably the problem of rapid worldwide urbanization—have demanded new ways of thinking about geography, citizenship, and community.  Through the two-year MA program, students strive to positively engage, critique, and transform contemporary urban life in multiple ways. The Urban Studies program integrates courses and resources from both the School of Studio Practice and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, allowing students to chart an individualized path of study. Faculty contribute expertise in such diverse—yet inextricably linked—fields as curatorial studies, visual studies, art history, anthropology, sociology, geography, comparative literature, philosophy, media/technology studies, ethnic studies and American studies. In addition, the Seed Fund Teaching Fellowship in Urban Studies brings distinguished artists, designers, architects, and planners to campus for discussions of urban practices.

Established in 2011, the Seed Fund Teaching Fellowship in Urban Studies was created as a co-curricular research and development initiative in support of SFAI’s Urban Studies program. Emphasizing art and design practices as forms of urban problem-solving, the fellowship program includes public lectures and colloquia by distinguished artists, designers, architects, planners, and artist collectives, and is meant to facilitate sustained on-campus residencies that enable discussions of process, aesthetics, and exemplary urban practices.

sfai.edu

San Francisco Urban Film Festival

Folks enjoy City Is Alive, socially distant on Egbert Avenue, a night of musical performances and interactive murals to celebrate the legacy of everyday heroes that brought joy and life to the Bayview. Photo: Lucas Bradley

Felipe Riley dances in front of an interactive mural projection of his mother, Lenora LeVon, during City is Alive. .Photo: Shantré Pinkney

Folks gather in an unfinished ground-level unit in the East Cut district of San Francisco for a film screening and panel discussion.

A film screening and panel discussion in Fern Alley, San Francisco, where audience members sit in chairs or on blankets.

Participants drafting stories at a Storytelling Workshop at the SFUFF’s 6th annual film festival in 2020.

Audience members gather in the Bayanihan Center for a SFUFF film screening and panel discussion, co-presented by SOMAP Pilipinas, on how different grass-roots organizations use arts and culture to promote community preservation and self-determination. Photo: Emma Marie Chiang

Participants work in small groups during a Storytelling Workshop in partnership with Young Community Developers aimed at building Black intergenerational wealth in the Bayview. Photo: Austin Blackwell

San Francisco Urban Film Festival
2019 - $5,000 General Support 
2018 - $5,000 General Operating Support
2017 - $5,000 Climate Change Programming

WHAT WE DO

The SF Urban Film Fest (SFUFF) gathers a diverse, engaged audience and uses the power of storytelling to spark discussion and civic engagement around urban issues. They ask what it means to live together and create just and equitable cities.

SFUFF is an interdisciplinary storytelling organization that produces an annual film festival, year-round film-based discussion events, and long-term community storytelling projects.

They collaborate with cultural, academic, grass-roots, and civic organizations including the Roxie Theater, SPUR, Imprint City, Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), and many others. Projects are often jointly initiated to combine film and community planning, most recently with Young Community Developers (YCD) in the Bayview Hunters Point and SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District in the SOMA district of San Francisco. In recognition of their impact on empowering communities using storytelling and film, the SFUFF are Artists in Residence at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).

IMPACT

Film Festival
Since its founding in 2014, SFUFF has produced an annual film festival for 7 seasons and year round programming encompassing 115 events reaching over 8,000 people. They expect to reach many more through their virtual film festival in February 2021.

Based on their festival surveys, year after year, SFUFF attracts diverse audiences and reaches across demographic divides. Its 6th annual film festival audience was 53% people of color. Their audience was also remarkably intergenerational: 18% are aged under 25, 69% are between 26-55 years old, and 13% are aged 55+.

SFUFF engages with diverse filmmakers and panelists. 63% of our 2020 Festival filmmakers are people of color; most notably, 44% of our 2020 Festival filmmakers are women of color. Additionally, 74% of our 2020 Festival panelists are people of color.

Community Storytelling
SFUFF’s community storytelling projects create opportunities for unique cross disciplinary partnerships between community organizations, businesses, cultural institutions and public agencies.

In partnership with YCD, they organized storytelling workshops and produced a short video to kick off the Black Owner’s Campaign. The goal was to build a strong narrative aimed at galvanizing a coalition of Black property owners to support more affordable housing. The resulting video features prominently on the YCD homepage and has resulted in a local developer expressing interest in building housing for Black teachers.

The storytelling and community planning with YCD led to the production of a multi-media one-night socially distant event featuring a live streamed hip hop concert and interactive film projections depicting historic murals. The event, City is Alive, was centered on the theme of everyday heroes who fight for resources and bring joy to the Bayview Hunters Point and was produced in collaboration with Imprint City and YBCA.

SFUFF is working with the SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District on a short documentary film that chronicles the displacement of Pilipinx community by the force of redevelopment in the Yerba Buena district of SOMA during the 1970's, and the community’s resistance and struggle for self-determination that grew out of it and in face of ongoing gentrification and displacement. They are currently in community-driven pre-production with a team of Pilipinx filmmakers and archival researchers, and in late 2021, will organize work in progress screenings and community discussions centering the stories and people of the film. The process of making this film is designed to dovetail with the community planning around the creation of the cultural heritage district that already includes the famous UNDISCOVERED SF night market and Kapawa Gardens.

WHO WE ARE

The SFUFF Core Team brings rich backgrounds in civic innovation, urban planning, housing finance, media, filmmaking, and the humanities. They work year-round planning events and curating programming. During the festival season, a small army of volunteers help them with photography, marketing, ticket sales, audience surveys, and more.

Our Core Team plays artistic roles as Program Producers. They also guide organizational growth and fill administrative and technical roles. The following are brief detailed bios of SFUFF’s Core Team:

Fay Darmawi, Founder and Executive Director
Fay is an urban planner, cultural producer, and community development banker. She belongs to a persecuted Chinese minority group and immigrated to the U.S. from Jakarta, Indonesia as a child.

Kristal Celik, Festival Manager
Kristal has a background in energy and mechanical engineering and identifies with her Turkish immigrant roots.

Robin Abad Ocubillo, Program Producer
Robin is an urban designer and urban planner at the City of San Francisco Planning Department and identifies as an LGBTQ Filipino-American.

Omeed Manocheri, Program Producer
Omeed is a first generation Iranian-American multimedia producer and entrepreneur with a fine arts degree. His media projects include Daily Kabob, a new digital platform to unify the MENA and DESI communities.

Susannah Smith, Program Producer
Susannah is a documentary filmmaker interested in ways race and sexuality interact with the politics of urban development. Susannah is assistant editor on the documentary “Homeroom” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021. She identifies as an LGBTQ Jewish-American.

Ronald Sundstrom, Humanities Advisor
Ronald is a Professor of Philosophy and a member of the African American Studies, Critical Diversity Studies programs at the University of San Francisco (USF). He identifies as mixed-race Filipino-American and Black, and LGBTQ.

sfurbanfilmfest.com

Seed Journey

Seed Journey
2017 - $10,000 General Support
2016 - $10,000 General Support

“We can speak of this voyage as return or a re-tracing of a very ancient route combining human and non-human initiative by which wheat was domesticated from the wild and then slowly made its way through gifts, trade, winds, and sea currents, from the highly cultured Middle East to the barbarians of the north...” - Michael Taussig

Seed Journey (2017 - 2020) was a seafaring voyage from Oslo, Norway to Istanbul, Turkey upon an 1895 rescue sailboat. Carrying hand fulls of seeds and a rotating crew of artists, farmers, bakers and researchers, Seed Journey was a process of reverse migration, retracing the path of seed dissemination, and by extension human migration, back to their origins in ancient times.  At each port, Futurefarmers gathered local heritage seed custodians, enacted Seed Ceremonies (elaborated seed exchanges) and accepted gifts and grains to add to a growing archive. The project situates grains as emancipatory actors with respect to intellectual property rights pertaining to biological matter.

futurefarmers.com/seedjourney

Shaping San Francisco

Shaping San Francisco
2019 - $10,000 General Support
2018 - $5,000 General Support 
2017 - $5,000 General Support
2016 - $5,000 General Support
2013 - $5,000 General Support
2012 - $5,000 General Support
2010 - $5,000 Ecology Emerges Project Documentation

Serving the City for 25 years, Shaping San Francisco is an ongoing multimedia project in bottom-up history, offering an online archive at FoundSF.org—a place to document, discover, and shape San Francisco history—and public programming sharing the stories of daily life in the City by the Bay. Shaping San Francisco provides access to the City's lost history, with a long-term goal of facilitating its discovery, presentation, and preservation. The project seeks to create a physical and virtual commons where together we make—and understand our place within—history every day

Shaping San Francisco believes that “History is a Creative Act in the Present,” or in other words, each person is an agent of history, and every moment is historical, even if relatively little makes it on to the “historical record.” Shaping San Francisco’s public engagement promotes the idea that history can—and should—be de-professionalized, made into a popular, participatory process. More than just a website, more than just a lecture series, more than a collection of ongoing walking and bike tours, Shaping San Francisco encourages collective investigation of and creation of new shared social histories about the world we cohabitate together.

Shaping San Francisco's work encourages ordinary citizens to see the urban environment around them having been created in by a combination of social and ecological processes over time, within historic economic and cultural contexts; just as important the urban environment is shaped, too, by a ceaseless effort to challenge the meaning and direction of those processes and contexts. Shaping San Francisco has focused from its origins on San Francisco's ecological history, the relentless leveling of its famous hills and the steady filling of the bay to “make land,” which permanently altered the surrounding bay. Shaping San Francisco’s historical investigations of the changing ecology of the City have led to unique and enduring analyses integrating its tradition of dissent with the dramatic (and often catastrophic) changes that dissenters often sought to prevent.

15 seasons of FREE Public Talks provide an informative, engaging cultural forum inviting presenters and audiences to dialogue about issues covering Art & Politics, Historical and Literary Perspectives, Social Movements, and Ecology, emphasizing the intersections of multiple themes across fluid boundaries of disciplines and paradigms. This in-person discussion space is meant as an antidote to historical amnesia, creating a place to change the climate of public intellectualism in San Francisco, and an unmediated place to meet and talk. Most all of the Public Talks are archived online. Historical walking and bicycle tours—and the recent addition of Urban Forums: Walk & Talks and Bay Cruises—bring people together to learn how the City is shaped through the efforts of engaged citizens and from a perspective rooted in its overlooked and forgotten histories, including those of marginalized populations (and species!) who don’t show up in the history books.

Shaping San Francisco fosters academic and community partnerships, incorporating a service learning element to its public programming, offering historic context for the issues currently faced in the urban setting through tours to students and community members. As seasoned tour guides, editors, and educators, the directors are frequently asked to share their expertise through custom tours and classes; they create customized tours each month as well as collaborative projects year-round including teaching, guest-curating, and co-producing projects. Shaping San Francisco is a fiscally-sponsored affiliate of Independent Arts & Media, with whom successful collaborations have been forged over the course of a decade.

shapingsf.org

Southern Exposure

Southern Exposure
2015 - $10,000 General Support
2008 - $10,000 Vapor Exhibition

Located in San Francisco’s Mission District, Southern Exposure (SOEX) has been presenting a diverse, innovative, contemporary art, arts education, and related programs and events for over 34 years. SOEX reaches out to diverse audiences and serves as a forum and resource center to provide extraordinary support to the Bay Area's arts and educational communities. Activities range from exhibitions of local, regional, and international visual artists’ work, education programs, and lectures, panel discussions, and performances. Southern Exposure is dedicated to giving artists—whether they are exhibiting, curating, teaching, or learning—an opportunity to realize ideas for projects that may not otherwise find support.

The exhibition, Vapor, surveyed art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work. Often inspired by forms of activism, the works reacted to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies – sensors, databases, and communications equipment – that were only recently accessible outside a lab. In this sense, the show's title also referred to the growing means by which this art is being produced, in addition to the ubiquity of greenhouse gases and other air conditions that serve as this art’s medium. Vapor proposed new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.

soex.org

Story of Stuff Project/Annie Leonard

Story of Stuff Project/Annie Leonard
2011 - $3,000 General Support

The Story of Stuff is a twenty minute animation on the way we make, use and throw away consumer goods.  With over 15 million views and counting, The Story of Stuff,  is one of the most watched environmental-themed online movies of all time.

The Story of Stuff Project was created by Annie Leonard to leverage and extend the film’s impact. It works to amplify public discourse on a series of environmental, social and economic concerns and facilitate the growing Story of Stuff community’s involvement in strategic efforts to build a more sustainable and just world. Their on-line community includes over 150,000 activists and they partner with hundreds of environmental and social justice organizations worldwide to create and distribute their films, curricula and other content.  Their latest movie, The Story of Change, has just been released.

storyofstuff.org

Ted Purves and Suzanne Cockrell

Ted Purves and Suzanne Cockrell
2009 - $1,750 The Meadow Network Newspaper

The Meadow Network project, which was started in 2009, is rooted in a broad series of interviews with city residents from diverse backgrounds. What traditions of growing, preserving, festival and bartering do they hold on to? How would they see these as manifesting in the cities that they reside in and their everyday life? What would future urban green space come to resemble? The interviews were conducted at city farms, open markets, gardening stores and public parks.

The interviews accompanied by photographs, drawings and maps have been compiled into free newspapers. Three issues have been completed to date, and two more issues are currently in planning.

PDF versions of the newspapers can be downloaded at
http://fieldfaring.wordpress.com/the-meadow-network/

Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves work collaboratively under the rubric of fieldfaring to create social art projects that investigate the overlay of urban and rural systems upon the lives of specific communities. They ask questions about the nature of people and place as seen through social economy, history and local ecology. The collaboration began with a two and a half year public project (2004-2007), Temescal Amity Works, which facilitated and documented the exchange of backyard produce, conversation, and collective biography within the Temescal Neighborhood of Oakland, CA.

fieldfaring.org

What is Missing?

What is Missing?
2016 - $10,000 What Is Missing? Project
2015 - $10,000 What Is Missing? Project
2014 - $10,000 What Is Missing? Project

Maya Lin is an artist and environmentalist. She established the What Is Missing? project to create, through science-based artworks, an awareness about the present mass extinction of species due to habitat degradation and loss, and to emphasize that by protecting and restoring habitats, carbon emissions can be reduced and species & habitats protected. Designed as Maya Lin’s last memorial, the What Is Missing? project takes place in multiple sites and forms dedicated to creating a connection between people and the species and places that have disappeared or are predicted to become extinct.

This project is a call to action and helps participants and viewers reimagine the human relationship to nature.  It creates hope by showing individuals what they can do to make a difference through their own consumer choices. The What Is Missing? project is made up of sound and media sculptures, traveling exhibitions, video installations, a physical and digital book and a website. Part of the website is devoted to introducing Greenprint for the Future, which when completed will help visitors examine their land use and resource consumption patterns and will demonstrate how changing these practices can effectively help the planet.

whatismissing.net

Youth Art Exchange

Youth Art Exchange
2013 - $5,000 Mobile Parklet

Founded in 2000, Youth Art Exchange provides relevant arts education that connects underserved high school-aged youth to the broader community. Based at the intersection of the Oceanview-Merced-Ingleside neighborhood and Excelsior, Youth Art Exchange fills the gap of services for youth in this low-income, multi-lingual neighborhood.

Mobile Parklet
A youth-designed and built parklet in San Francisco’s Oceanview-Merced-Ingleside neighborhood offers a green gathering space in front of the centrally located Fog Lifter Café on Ocean Avenue, improving public life by keeping this commercial corridor accessible and exciting for urban dwellers and visitors.

youthartexchange.org