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The San Francisco Bay Area is known for a diverse range of artist-run projects and artist-centered organizations, a vital legacy that continues today. Tanya Zimbardo gathers key leaders in the contemporary art scene — Jackie Im, Conrad Meyers, and Dorothy R. Santos. They have each contributed to the display of and dialogue around time-based media art through their curatorial work, including co-founding spaces or initiatives and hosting conversations. This panel will explore various curatorial perspectives on supporting video art and digital media, from producing solo project shows and group festivals to integrating time-based work within cross-media presentations.

Tanya Zimbardo is a San Francisco-based curator. As an assistant curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she has (co-)curated several exhibitions and co-edited publications. Her current exhibition, Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith, is on view through May 23, 2021. In 2020 she organized two #MuseumFromHome streaming series of artist film and video works. Zimbardo has guest (co-)curated exhibitions, screenings, and public programs for Bay Area nonprofit arts organizations, including Artists’ Television Access, Berkeley Art Center, Canyon Cinema Foundation, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Mills College Art Museum, San Francisco Cinematheque, and The 500 Capp Street Foundation. Zimbardo co-organizes the online series In Process and has contributed to publications such as VoCA Journal and INCITE: Journal for Experimental Media. 

Conrad Meyers is a director, curator, educator, and advocate for experiential art. Trained in architecture and engineering, and later in sculpture, video, and animation, Meyers works with artists that use a variety of media, technologies, and scale in their projects. Meyers is a supporter of experiential artwork in the Bay Area, that is to say, visual artwork that needs to be fully physically observed to be fully appreciated. He fundamentally believes that the importance of visual art is the present-tense interaction between art and viewer that creates a nonreplicable conversation that has the ability to profoundly change a human being’s relationship with the world. In 2011, he co-founded Aggregate Space, an Oakland non-profit video and installation gallery, screening facility, fabrication shop, and design studio. In addition to being the director of the gallery, Meyers has curated their lectures, artist conversations, and film series.  

Jackie Im is a curator, writer, and editor based in Oakland, CA. She currently serves at the Associate Curator of the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries. She is also the co-founder and Director of Et al. and Et al., etc. in San Francisco. Im has organized exhibitions at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (SF), Queens Nails (SF), The Lab (SF), Important Projects (Oakland), Holiday Forever (Jackson Hole, Wyoming), and SFAC Galleries. Her writing has appeared in Fillip Magazine, Art Practical, Curiously Direct, and various exhibition catalogues. She holds a BA in Art History from Mills College and an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. 

Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, artist, and educator. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SFMOMA’s Open Space. She hosted the podcasts PRNT SCRN and State of the Art and guest curated the 2019 season of Living Room Light Exchange. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society. Santos is a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene v. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.