California-born and Berkeley-based artist Alfonso Alvarez has worked for more than 20 years as a filmmaker and teacher. He has collaborated with a number of musicians and filmmakers to create multi-projector shows with live musical accompaniment. His films, which draw the viewer’s attention with outstanding use of color and highly charged sound tracks, have screened in warehouses, bars, galleries, and film festivals locally and around the world, including the SF International, Ann Arbor, Humboldt, Videoex, Chicago Underground, Antimatter Underground, New York, Austin, Denver and Tokyo International film festivals. He recently co-produced a six-projector, live music show for The Illuminated Corridor show at Oakland Ironworks. He is currently collaborating with CCA Film/Video/Performance alumnus Steve Dye in creating a site-specific three- projector, four-channel audio performance for San Francisco Cinematheque. He holds a BFA from the California College of the Arts, and an MA from San Francisco State University.

Janis Crystal Lipzin, called “one of the key American media artists of this era” by Steve Anker, Dean of the School of Film &Video at Cal Arts, has been making art in virtually every form of reproducible media for nearly forty years. Utilizing such diverse media as 8mm and 16mm film, photographic prints and transparencies, video, audio, digital photography, multi-media installations and media performance, she has confronted an array of uncomfortable subjects such as pyromania, prehistoric murder, pesticide abuse, reproductive rights, and mortality. She taught Film and Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 2009 where she served as Chair of the Film Department, and before that, directed the Film/Photo Program at Antioch College. Lipzin’s films and photo work have been featured in numerous museum shows including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery and the Kunstmuseum in Berne, Switzerland. Her many awards include three Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kathleen Quillian is an artist and arts administrator living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. Since then, she has exhibited animations, multimedia installations and live cinema performances in venues and festivals around the San Francisco Bay Area as well as nationally and internationally including International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco International Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Animasivo and the San Jose Museum of Art among others. She is co-founder and co-director of Shapeshifters Cinema and a co-curator for the Temescal Street Cinema. Her work is preoccupied with metaphysical cultural practices and how they relate to the creative process and our relationship to the divine.

Filmmaker and curator Konrad Steiner lives in San Francisco and makes cinema performances with musicians and writers, winning awards and screening in festivals worldwide. He served on the curatorial committee of SF Cinematheque from 2003-06, and co-founded and produced the screening and performance series kino21 from 2007-09. His work has increasingly involved live cinema collaborations with musicians (composers Jon Raskin of ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Matt Ingalls of sfsound, bandleader/composers  Graham Connah and Lisa Mezzacappa) and poets (Leslie Scalapino, Steve Benson, Brent Cunningham, Carla Harryman, Jen Hofer).  Steiner is also an important inspirational and organizational force behind the recent neo-benshi (film narration) revival, and has worked with groups of poets all over the U.S. in this art form.