Emergence, the annual convening of the EAP network, provides a collaborative platform for Bay Area arts & culture workers to connect, share ideas, and elevate their work and voices.
EMERGENCE 2016: CRAFTING EQUITY, SHIFTING POWER
What is a cultural equity framework for arts administration in the Bay Area and how can we become empowered to facilitate implementation in our organizations? How do we collectively & individually create space to understand power, privilege, and cultural equity? How do we effectively practice sustainability on the personal, professional and organizational level? Join colleagues for an inspiring day of critical introspection and collective strategizing.
*Please practice awareness at Emergence 2016, and help us make this event accessible to all by arriving fragrance free.
Lauren Benetua is an arts advocate and cultural worker in love with art for social change. She is a Bay Area-born Filipina with a BA in History of Art and Visual Culture from UC Santa Cruz and an MA in Museum Studies the Lorenzo de’ Medici International Institute of Florence, Italy. Lauren currently serves as the Program Assistant for the EAP SF/BA Fellowship; Gallery Coordinator at Betti Ono in Downtown Oakland; and founding Artistic Director for People of Coloring, a coloring book project for, by and about people of color. Lastly, she is a dedicated weaver’s apprentice with the Laga Weaving Circle guided by Kalinga master-weaver, Jenny Mabilong Bawer Young of the Lubuagan province in the Philippines. She is a former Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow (2014-15) with the Cultural Equity focus group, and a recent recipient of the Western Arts Federation Award for Emerging Art Leaders of Color (2015).
As a proud product of New York City public schools and a teenage idealist, I moved to Atlanta in 1992 with the intention of pursuing law as a doorway to being a public servant in service of those that had not been served by our society and its systems. However, in my sophomore year of college I read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities and realized for the first time how dramatically different my educational experiences were from those less than 10 miles from me based on race and socio-economic status.
ChE (pronoun- they/ them/ their) is a Queer Afro-Indigenous artivist working at the intersections of youth leadership development, cultural equity consulting, and socially engaged artmaking. In 2013 ChE launched Breathe-In Liberation, an incubator for Queer and Trans activists-of-color to practice embodied leadership. Through this platform, ChE partnered with Destiny Arts Center and founded the Art Liberation Troupe, a QTPOC youth performance group utilizing dance, street theatre, and youth-led arts activism workshops as tools for social change. A consultant in race/ gender justice and movement integrated curriculum design, ChE has most recently worked with Destiny Arts Center, Healthy Initiatives for Youth, BAYC Our Space, Montclair Dance Athletics, and Alameda Head Start. As a director/ choreographer, ChE’s work is robust with gospel soul sounds and movement of the African Diaspora that leave feet stomping and hands clapping—fusing Contemporary Modern, Afro-house, and Congolese dance with multi-generational storytelling and interactive installation. ChE has been an artist in residence with Spirit Garden Productions, Press Street Gallery, Dancing Grounds, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts—where they debuted Black Modern dance as an integrative form of Afro-diasporic healing. Currently ChE is developing a framework for Afro-Indigenous activism piloted through #DignityInProcess, a body of work responding to the Black Lives Matter movement through ancestral healing, art as direct action, and identity evolution within the Diaspora. Performances and workshops have been offered throughout the Bay Area, New York, and New Orleans with featured guest artists including the award-winning Luisah Teish and Black Panther Mariama Curry. As an Emerging Arts Professionals MADE awardee, ChE was thrilled to launch #DignityInProcess: Ofun, gathering a circle of Queer Black artists, elders, arts administrators, and activists to develop models of Black leadership in the arts and social justice.
Lisa Evans
Maria Jensen is the Public Partnerships Manager at SFMoMA, and Founding Director at ArtPadSF. She has established a strong national and international business and art world network as a result of her many years in the art industry. Maria arrived to the Bay Area almost 6 years ago from Venice, CA where she launched a private underground gallery/salon called Salon Oblique as a social experiment and response to the white box gallery experience. Salon Oblique events in a short while became SRO events that ended up in Black Book magazine and received other notable lifestyle press articles. Additionally some of the artists that exhibited at Salon Oblique secured relationships with notable galleries and museums.
SK Kerastas
Joen joined ArtSpan staff in 2014 as the Interim Executive Director and has served on the Board since 2013. In addition to regularly attending SF Open Studios as a patron since 1994, Joen has been affiliated with ArtSpan as an artist participant herself in 2003, and as a host of her husband, 
Erin cofounded/directs the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data visualization, data analysis, and oral history collective documenting Bay Area dispossession and resistance in the wake of the Tech Boom. Erin is also a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, working on a project around radicalized dispossession and Silicon Valley technologics in the Bay Area and in Romania.
Ebony McKinney
Kirthi Nath is a filmmaker, yogini and sacred activist who believes that ordinary people ripple extraordinary change. Kirthi weaves trails of light that find form as films, meditations, writing and creative presence and business coaching. As founder, creative director and lead filmmaker at Cinemagical Media, Kirthi works with social entrepreneurs, nonprofits and values based companies to create films that support individuals and communities to ‘be the cause that creates the effect’. Kirthi’s films have featured cultural visionaries such as Tara Sophia Mohr, Eve Ensler, Jack Kornfield and Alice Walker, and tell stories with bravery, courage and heart that bring messages alive and inspire social change. In addition to filmmaking, Kirthi offers experiential workshops, talks, meditations and coaching that help people connect with their inner wisdom, foster loving presence and awaken wonder. These offerings draws from a variety of wisdom practices, including Buddhism, Tantra, and Yoga traditions, as well as explorations in play and magic. Current and past themes (in person/online) include: Creative Presence, Sacred Presence, Uncertainty and Intention, Modern Day Mindfulness, Heart Gladdening Practices and Storytelling. Kirthi has also developed visualizations shared in context of live art performance projects (San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Southern Exposure, SomArts) and uses wisdom practices in the creation and process of her own filmmaking and sacred activist work. In Summer 2016, in association with Cinemagical Media, Kirthi will officially launch the Modern Day Mindfulness Initiative – a portal for wisdom course offerings, coaching, meditations, talks and artistic inspirations, offered online and in person. www.cinemagicalmedia.com
Dia Penning, has held leadership positions at the Columbia College Chicago, the San Francisco Arts Commission and California College of the Arts: Center for Art and Public Life. She designs experiences to examine complex intersections, placing those most marginalized at the center of inquiry, using creativity, breath, movement, and story. 
Jackie Ramos, San Francisco native from the Mission district, is a first generation womanist warrior of Filipina, Black, Native American, Spanish, and white descent. Ever since a child, Jackie was called to serve the people, and found transcendence in poetry and acting. For over 10 years, she has worked on health promotion and disease prevention initiatives serving underserved communities in areas of HIV prevention, substance use, mental illness, and incarceration at UCSF and Stanford. With a degree in psychology pursued at the University of San Francisco, she plans to pursue a doctorate degree in public health with a focus in the arts as a method of healing for youth who have been impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline. For over three years, she has acted in an array of films and commercials. As a poetess/spoken word artist, she uses poetry as her weapon to break walls of fear and build bridges of love. Currently, she is working as a creative artist/researcher with Marcus Shelby on a project called, “Beyond the Blues: Ending the Prison Industrial Complex.” They use research and the arts to raise consciousness around mass incarceration in efforts to find solutions to fight this epidemic and bring sustainable change. While actively pursuing acting and writing, she also is a healing mentor and poetry instructor at San Francisco’s Juvenile Hall, Unit 7 (maximum security for young men ages 16-19 years old) and at the Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC). YWFC works with young women who have been involved with the juvenile justice system and/or underground street economy. Jackie is committed to helping others, especially the youth—to recognize their power and exert it in positive ways that will allow them to thrive. With love, community, the arts, and promoting knowledge of self—she believes that this battle against injustice can be won, and will not stop until all our youth are protected, nurtured, and loved.
Jerome Reyes 
With a background in architecture, education and policy, Beth Rubenstein is a Legislative Aide to Supervisor John Avalos, of District 11 in San Francisco. She works on city budget, workforce development, children and youth policy, arts policy, and District 11 community development projects. She is the co-founder and was the long-time executive director of Youth Art Exchange (formerly Out of Site Youth Arts Center), which offers programs in visual and performing arts, and leadership development to San Francisco public high school youth. She has taught at the high school and college level. Beth is a 2012 – 2017 Koshland Civic Unity Fellow for the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco, awarded by the San Francisco Foundation in recognition of being a “Bay Area grassroots risk taker” and for taking on “the most stubborn neighborhood problems as a personal challenge and [working] collaboratively to overcome them.
Gregory Stock’s work focuses on expanding creative solutions, design thinking and equity. Most recently, he was Director of Public Affairs with Illuminate where he helped raise $4 million through private donors and crowd sourcing funds, which ushered The Bay Lightsback to the Bay Area in January 2016. He was museum educator at the 
Tyese serves small to mid-sized arts organizations and artists through real estate development at CAST, the Community Arts Stabilization Trust. She brings extensive nonprofit administration experience to her role, spanning education, family literacy, youth development, and the arts. Prior to CAST, Tyese honed her social justice lens as a grantmaker in Cultural Equity Grants at the San Francisco Arts Commission, and as a presenter and producer of culture-specific artist populations with the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. A 2014 Emerging Arts Professionals MADE award recipient, Tyese has been recognized for her expertise as a panelist, consultant, facilitator, and advisor for various Bay Area arts organizations, including Silicon Valley Creates (formerly Arts Council Silicon Valley), Alliance for California Traditional Arts, Black Choreographers Festival, and the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. As a passionate and community-based grantmaker, administrator, artist, and teacher, Tyese creates life balance by nourishing her physical, mental, and spiritual health through dance, yoga, and meditation.
