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  • Shannon Amidon
    Shannon Amidon
    Visual Artist: Photographer, Videographer
    Shannon Amidon was born and raised in San Jose, CA. She is a mixed media artist using alternative process photography, encaustic and paper ephemera as her main mediums. Her subjects often involve objects the artist has found in nature or collected in her travels such as: seed pods, insects, botanicals, fossils, feathers, bones, and vintage paper ephemera. Using these items and mediums, Amidon creates unique pieces that explore the beautiful, repulsive, and mysterious sides of natural history. Shannon’s artwork has been exhibited worldwide with emphasis on the US West Coast. In 2011 she was named the Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Laureate, receiving a Fellowship Grant in photography. She was also the recipient of an Eco Art Grant and studio make-over from the Art Inspector part of the Zero One Art and Technology Network. In 2013 Amidon was one of eight artists chosen to create a large, 400lb, 5ft x 6ft public art heart for San Francisco General Hospital Foundation. Amidon has been an artist in residence at the Herhúsid House Artist Residency in Iceland as well as the David and Julia White Artist Colony in Costa Rica. She is active in her local arts community contributing her time, knowledge and art whenever possible. She is also involved in arts education outreach for children and young artist mentoring through the SPARK program.
  • Andres Cediel
    Andres Cediel
    Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Andrés Cediel is known for his work on Rape in the Fields (2013), which investigates the hidden reality of rape on the job for immigrant women, for Frontline, and the Spanish-language version, “Violacion de un Sueno,” for Univision. Andrés Cediel was the Co-Producer on the Emmy-nominated film, “The Judge and the General,” which chronicled human rights cases against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This film received a duPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism. Cediel was also the Co-Producer on “Post Mortem”, a collaborative reporting project between Frontline, NPR and ProPublica, looking at death investigation in America. Cediel has produced pieces on refugees of violence in Colombia, environmental justice in Ecuador, and Native American burial desecration in California. He worked as a Master Video Teacher in KQED’s Education Network, and was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship by Arts Council Silicon Valley for 2007. Cediel graduated from Brown University and received a Masters degree in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley.
  • Tricia Creason-Valencia
    Tricia Creason-Valencia
    Visual Artist: Photographer, Videographer
    Tricia is currently producing a one-hour documentary titled Stable Life, which tells the story of a family of undocumented immigrants who live and work on the backside of a racetrack. She also directed the award-winning short films, Eighty Layers of Me (that you’ll have to survive), a documentary about former cheerleaders turned activists and We Got Next, a narrative about young women basketball players. Both films won numerous awards and screened at festivals throughout the United States. Tricia is the founder of FLACAFILMS, where she works as a director/producer and digital video editor. She has taught film/video production and documentary filmmaking in the Social Documentation department at U.C. Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Drexel University and in collaboration with several youth-related non-profit organizations. Tricia is a PBS/CPB Producer’s Academy Fellow (2008) and a Latino Producers Academy Fellow (2008). She serves on the Board of CreaTV San Jose, a community access television station and traning center. Tricia received her BA from U.C. Berkeley (Psychology and Chicano Studies) and graduated from San Francisco State University with an MFA in Film Production. She lives in San Jose, California, with her husband and two children.
  • Ruth Eckland
    Ruth Eckland
    Visual Artist: Videographer
    This is a world of visual over-stimulation. Much of it we become inured to and barely perceive. Eckland crafts videos to represent the unconscious synthesis that takes place in each of us as we absorb that endless stream of ambient information, direct and peripheral; her videos equip us to cope with, transform and utilize the bits of information that we are constantly absorbing. By layering, abstracting, and moving freely along the continuum of time, images in her videos dissolve, elide, conflict, develop. Perceptions are brought into focus. In Eckland’s work, the lens becomes a microscope, under which a single subject may be captured to honor the ebb and flow of movement and the subtle inherent changes; or a complex palette of seemingly unrelated images may be edited together in conceptual harmony. No matter what form the videos take, she defuses preconceptions that tired familiarity with the many genres of moving media can engender by bringing the sensibility of painting, altered photography or experimental film to the works. Eckland’s videos are non-narrative pieces in the sense of any linear storytelling. Rather, they have the form and structure of poetry or a music composition. They are metaphoric, almost dreams, with repetition used like a refrain or a chorus. Interpretation, including associative narrative, becomes a collaboration with the viewer. To enhance this experience of collaboration, Eckland designs her video installations as immersive environments, and installs her work site-specifically. Because the allusive nature of these pieces requires the attention, experience and creative imagining of the viewer to make their own connections and devise their own stories, sound is always integral to and fully integrated with the video, much as in music videos or film scores. Eckland collaborates with several composers who create original music for the works, in a process that is an ongoing dialogue with the visuals as each piece is being created. Utilized in a variety of ways, the sound becomes one more carrier of information to the senses, adding layers of subtext to the visual images and creating a more evocative, immersive experience. Eckland has exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally and finds it particularly gratifying to discover the connection that viewers in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Germany, Singapore, Turkey, The Czech Republic, United Kingdom, and China have made with the work. Some universal language seems to be communicated, some global core touched. Or as Kenneth Baker has said in one of his many insightful reviews of Eckland’s work over the past few years in The San Francisco Chronicle, “Eckland handles video like the medium of collective dreams that we share without knowing it. Apparently she wants us to know it.”
  • Jezrael Gandara
    Jezrael Gandara
    Literary Arts; Performing Artist: Producer; Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Jezrael Gandara’s work straddles the line between documentary and art, encouraging his subjects to communicate their feelings. “There are parts of San Jose that remind me of El Paso, and it makes it feel like home. I hope my work can make an impact within the community by helping share its stories.”
  • Jan Krawitz
    Jan Krawitz
    Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Jan Krawitz has been independently producing documentary films for 35 years. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals in the United States and abroad, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Edinburgh, SilverDocs, London, Sydney, Full Frame, South by Southwest and the Flaherty Film Seminar. She has recently completed Perfect Strangers, a documentary that follows one woman as she embarks on an unpredictable, four-year journey of twists and turns, determined to give away one of her kidneys. Krawitz’s previous film, Big Enough, was broadcast on the national PBS series P.O.V. and internationally in eighteen countries. Her documentaries, Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, Little People, and Drive-in Blues were all broadcast on national PBS and her short film Styx is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Little People was nominated for a national Emmy Award and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Krawitz has had one-woman retrospectives of her films at venues including the Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Rice Media Center, the Austin Film Society, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2011, she was awarded an artist’s residency at Yaddo. Krawitz is a Professor at Stanford University and director of the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video.
  • Monica Lam
    Monica Lam
    Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Monica Lam is a documentary film and television producer who has traveled on five continents producing, reporting, and shooting for the NewsHour, Frontline, Frontline/WORLD and other PBS programs as well as Swiss television and MSNBC. She has won an Emmy for her work and was cinematographer of an Oscar-nominated short documentary. Monica has written for the Daily Californian, San Francisco Chronicle, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Hyphen magazine and was the founding editor of Berkeley Patch, a daily hyperlocal news site. She studied urban planning at Stanford University and received her masters in journalism from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
  • Joanne Lee
    Joanne Lee
    Visual Artist: Animator, Filmmaker, Videographer
    My current work is engaged with Design and Design Thinking.
  • Eric Predoehl
    Eric Predoehl
    Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Eric Predoehl is a multimedia professional whose talents have been utilized as a producer, director, writer, camera operator, editor, photo-journalist, graphic designer, AV technician, and idea generator. Fascinated by new ideas, unique stories and the ever-evolving role of technology, Eric continues to be excited by the San Francisco Bay Area he calls his home base. Growing up as a military brat living in a variety of different locations in the USA and Europe, Eric had a taste of cultural diversity at an early age. When he attended college, receiving a B.A. degree in Radio-TV Broadcast from San Jose State, and an A.A. degree in Professional Photography from De Anza College, Eric was also managing an independent record label, administrating all aspects of the business including promotions, manufacturing, distribution, and tour management. During his time in college, he also participated in programming, promotions, journalism and photography at KFJC Radio, a nationally-acclaimed college radio station known for a lot of news-breaking activities. It was at KFJC where he collaborated on a “LOUIE LOUIE” marathon, where he met the author of this song, Richard Berry, a man who was struggling to survive with welfare benefit even as his compositions sold millions of records. Eric’s life was forever changed when he had the foresight to bring a video camera to document what turned out to be a rather historic event. Not long after this momentous event, Eric was approached by an independent video producer that wanted to videotape an event that Eric was producing in San Francisco. The independent producer was Jesse Block, who became a good friend and fellow collaborator in the world of video production. Since that initial meeting over twenty years ago, Eric and Jesse have continued to work together on a variety of different media productions, taking them to a lot of places in California and the United States, with an occasional visit to Europe for a working vacation. In 2003, Eric was involved with the Howard Dean presidential campaign. Starting off with the now-historic Sacramento speech before his official announcement, Eric became one of the earliest video producers actively documenting the campaign, using the powers of the internet and grass-roots activism to promote Dean’s candidacy. Ultimately, Dean’s efforts were crippled by a renegade audio recording, but the Dean campaign was truly a groundbreaking effort that changed the way political campaigns used the power of the internet. Music continues to a major driving force for much of Eric’s most exciting projects. When the Blues Express media company decided to develop a syndicated television program about blues music, Eric was hired as a producer, writer and senior researcher. He also wrote liner notes for three different Blues Express CD releases. In the course of his ongoing LOUIE LOUIE research and documentary production, he’s also collaborated with Ace Records of UK, helping them secure direct access to some previously unreleased master tape libraries. Under the OctaLouie umbrella, Eric Predoehl continues to collaborate his pal Jesse Block to produce a wide variety of video productions. They’ve produced broadcast television programming, music documentaries, concert videos, live event presentations, corporate motivational programming, commercials, public service announcements, and more….
  • John Reily
    John Reily
    Visual Artist: Animator, Filmmaker, Videographer
  • Kristine Samuelson
    Kristine Samuelson
    Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Kristine Samuelson has been an independent filmmaker for over 25 years.  She was nominated for an Academy Award for Arthur and Lillie and has received Artist’s Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.  A faculty member in the Documentary Film and Video M.F.A. Program at Stanford University, she is the Edward Clark Crossett Emerita Professor of Humanistic Studies in the Department of Art and Art History.  From 1999-2006, Samuelson served on the Board of the Independent Television Service.  She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
  • Lili Schad
    Lili Schad
    Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    I live in New York City and New Paltz, NY with my two amazing children. Over the past 25 years I have created using mixed media, film and photography. My work is inspired by a love of nature and adventure, and driven by a passion for the understanding and the healing of the earth and everyone and everything on it.  My objective is to create something, anything, every day that I have the privilege of waking up. I began my career as a photographer for Warren Miller ski movies, which was a lot of fun and just a little bit dangerous, as we were documenting the start of the extreme sports media phenomenon.  When it was time to move on, I founded Clearwater Films in San Francisco, and for the next 15 years focused on making films to inspire the conservation of the great outdoors. Of course there was a big wave film in there (the first Maverick’s documentary) since old habits do die hard. Then came my beautiful children and with them, a switch to the creation of fine art, or rather, a passion for making things from nothing that express who and what I am without homage to anything else. I have found a lot of personal meaning in this freedom. Connect with me.  Start a discussion. Come back to my site. Enjoy this moment ‘cause it’s all you got. As it reads on my studio door (from Thich Nhat Hanh)
  • Connie Steinman
    Connie Steinman
    Educator; Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Connie Steinman is a filmmaker and high school teacher for American Sign Language and English.
  • Deborah Mills Thackrey
    Deborah Mills Thackrey
    Visual Artist: Photographer, Videographer
    Photographer Deborah Mills Thackrey was born in the Texas Panhandle town of Amarillo in 1953. Numerous childhood trips along old Route 66 thru the Southwest instilled in her a wanderlust and love of the passing scenery including dramatic sunsets, old motel signs, roadside attractions like snake shows, desert landscapes, the Navajo Indian reservation, Burma Shave signs, and National Parks like the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, and the Grand Canyon. Iconic images from the Vietnam War and 60’s cultural protests inspired in her a love of the ability of the photojournalist to capture a meaningful moment in time. She joined her junior high yearbook staff in order to get her hands on her first camera. As the only photographer in high school journalism class she was left alone in the darkroom to develop her skills. This put her on the path of being self-taught and independent most of her career. Thackrey migrated to California at the age of 20, unable to get into regular art classes at San Francisco State she began to study theatrical design. The influence of her makeup and costume design is visible in her projected nudes series. In the next phase of her life she began a career as a graphic designer which gave her an opportunity to work art directing top commercial photographers at major corporations such as Apple. She also spent 30 years studying modern dance with a student of seminal modern dance pioneer Lester Horton. Recent projects include a third collaboration with dancer Ishika Seth at the Theatre Yugen in San Francisco projecting her textural photographs and videos onto dancers who improvised to the content of the images. When her husband Tom returned to photography about a decade ago, she picked up a camera again as well, after more than a 20 year absence. They spent time in the esteemed photographic community of Carmel beginning friendships with photographers such as Edward Weston’s grandson Kim. Within a couple of years of serious immersion in photography, Thackrey was offered her first solo exhibit in Monterey at the Stefani Esta gallery in 2002. She began to regularly win prizes in juried shows in Los Gatos and Santa Clara with curators such as Philip Linhares from the Oakland Museum and the Triton’s George Rivera. Solo exhibits in Los Angeles and Palo Alto followed, as well as being included in more than 50 group shows ranging from the Texas Photographic Society, to galleries in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Monterey. Thackrey has recently become an activist for artists in the South Bay as one of the founders of the Silicon Valley Artists’ Collaborative with the goal of helping to create more recognition and opportunities for local artists. She has been trying her hand as a curator and gallerist founding the Axis Art Gallery in downtown San Jose’s Axis high rise. Thackrey won the coveted 2009 Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship Grant for Photography which included a show in the rotunda of Santa Clara’s Triton Museum. Her work is in private collections from New York to LA and Marin County and in corporate collections such as Adobe.
  • Pam  Walton
    Pam Walton
    Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer
    Pam Walton, Producer/Director, has two masters from Stanford University, one in Education and the other in Communication (Film and Video Production). Walton is an award-winning independent video producer. Her work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and has been included in the prestigious International Public Television Screening Conference (INPUT). Her documentaries have aired on PBS member stations in major American cities, are broadcast nationally on MTV’s LOGO, and distributed by New Day Films. From 1989 to 1999 Walton was a lecturer in the Department of Communication (Film and Video Production) at Stanford University.
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