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
Jyoti Argade
Beatriz Mejia
Galen Melchert
Thet Shein Win
Jessica Abbott Williams
Program committee
Elliot Anderson
Cristine Blanco
champoy
Sergio De La Torre
Jackie Im
Simon Tran
Rochelle Youk
Minoosh Zomorodinia
STAFF
Kimberley Acebo Arteche, Co-Executive Director
Elena Gross, Co-Executive Director
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, secretary
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 is a gallerist and independent curator based in Berkeley. She holds a master’s in Museum Studies from JFK University, and earned a bachelor's in geology at University of Montana. As an art world polymath with a deep concern for our climate crisis, her work spans the topics of art, environment, and activism. She is currently the director of Johansson Projects in Oakland, a contemporary art gallery that functions as a curatorial laboratory and locus for curators, collectors, and artists to connect and engage in dialogue with the larger art community. She is also an active player in her son’s school community: a Green Team member and advocate for climate curriculum in schools, and co-founder of a parent-led affinity group, the Anti-Racism Learning Project.
Jyoti argade
Beatriz Mejia
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.
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.
Jessica Abbott Williams
Jessica Abbott Williams was born in Washington, DC., and grew up traveling extensively and living around the world, including years spent in Thailand and Austria. As an undergraduate, she studied English Literature and Poetry at Westmont College in Montecito and earned a BFA in ceramics at California College of the Arts. Jessica is the founder and owner of Brushstrokes, a community art space and ceramics studio in Berkeley, and has maintained a studio practice in both ceramics and painting. She has sold her line of ceramics at the SFMOMA Museum Store, the Palo Alto Art Center Gallery Shop, The Gardener in Berkeley, and FarmHouseUrban in Mill Valley. In 2019, she participated in an artist collaboration with the fashion designer Erica Tanov on a line of clothing and showed her paintings at Erica Tanov boutiques in Berkeley, Marin, and Los Angeles.
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
Kimberley Acebo Arteche, Co-Executive Director
Kimberley Acebo Arteche (she/they) is an educator, cultural worker, and interdisciplinary artist. Arteche received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and MFA from San Francisco State University, where she received the School of Art’s Distinguished Graduate award. She is the co-founder of Balay Kreative, a future Filipinx American Cultural Center providing artist sustainability and professional development programs in SOMA Pilipinas, and has served on Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council, SOMA Pilipinas’ Arts & Culture Committee, and was the Visual Arts curator for UNDISCOVERED SF. She is Community Arts Panelist for the Zellerbach Family Foundation, is a Healing Justice Practitioner with the Anti-Police Terror Project, and is a 2023 Leaderspring LeadStrong fellow. Arteche is committed to collaboratively creating decolonial practices within arts institutions, while creating visibility and providing resources for emerging Asian Pacific American and BIPOC Artists.
Elena Gross, Co-Executive Director
Elena Gross (she/they) joins the Berkeley Art Center with eight years of experience in the Bay Area arts and culture sector, including working at commercial galleries, independent nonprofits, culturally specific institutions, and arts publications. She most recently served as the Director of Exhibitions & Curatorial Affairs at Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and has been an independent writer and culture critic specializing in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Gross has presented her writing and research at institutions and conferences across the U.S., including Nook Gallery, Southern Exposure, KADIST, Harvard College, YBCA, California College of the Arts, and the GLBT History Museum. She is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Culture, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. Elena received an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2016 and a BA in Art History and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2012.
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.