Who We Are

Staff

Board of Directors

Curatorial Council

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Interns

  • Evelyn Kuo  - Programs and Exhibitions Intern
  • Khaled Alqahtani - Community Arts and Development Intern

Site Credits

Design by MacFadden & Thorpe
Development by Kanopi Studios
Maintenance by Palante Technology Cooperative

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Staff Bios

Valerie Imus, Artistic Director and Co-Director
Valerie Imus is the Co-Director and Artistic Director at Southern Exposure. In her tenure with the organization since 2011, she has overseen numerous exhibitions, projects, performances, and events for Southern Exposure. Her curatorial projects at SoEx include Hallucinations of Remembrance & Imminence, Metropolis, When and where I enter, Steam Work, You Make a Better Wall Than A Window, How to Move a Mountain, and Hopeless and Otherwise. Formerly, she was the Exhibitions Manager at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Curatorial Associate at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art. She has also curated projects at the Oakland Museum of California and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She first became involved at Southern Exposure as an exhibiting artist in 2001. She has collaborated with the collectives The Citizens Laboratory and OPENrestaurant and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago a long time ago.

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Emma Rosenbaum, Marketing and Communications Coordinator
Emma Rosenbaum (she/her) is a mixed race, cis femme, interdisciplinary arts professional based in the Bay Area. Her personal arts practice spans from creative writing to sewing to playing the ukulele. She received her Bachelors in English at UC Berkeley, where she studied creative writing with acclaimed authors including Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Hass, Georgina Kleege, and Melanie Abrams. As the winner of the 2016 Roselyn Schneider Eisner Fiction Prize, Emma is published in several literary magazines and publications including The Daily Californian and The Weekender. She began her career screenwriting for a Tanzanian soap opera and then transitioned into the fine art world, doing art writing and curation. Today, Emma splits her time between Aunt Lute Books, an intersectional feminist nonprofit publisher where she is the Director of Marketing and Programming, and Southern Exposure, where she is the Marketing and Communications Coordinator. She continues to develop her career at the intersection of the arts and social justice, with a commitment to beauty as truth, contradiction, and story.

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Simon Tran, Artists in Education Program Manager
Simon Tran aka Ghost Ghost Teeth is a Long Beach, California born artist and educator. He received a BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley. His art practice includes painting, drawing, and installation. He is an active member of Dragon School 99 where he has designed and painted murals in urban and indoor settings. Tran has frequently shown with the Compound Gallery in Oakland. His work is in The Capital One Collection. He believes Sunday afternoons are best spent listening to records and playing video games with his daughter. 

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Mário Pires Cordeiro, Exhibitions and Facilities Coordinator

Mário Pires Cordeiro is an American-Portuguese artist and mentor. He was born in Lisbon and lived in London for ten years before moving to California in 2015. He received his MFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design at the University of the Arts, London and completed three years of a PhD researching color trends in fine arts. He has been commissioned by the Olympic and Paralympic Games Committee in 2012 and the Cape Farewell Foundation in 2013. He has exhibited in over forty solo and group exhibitions. Since 2016 he has been the Curator Auction Manager, The Crucible Soiree Art Auction, and he has been teaching at the Crucible since 2018. Recently he was a finalist for National Parks Arts Foundation - Hawaii Volcanoes Artist Residency, and is currently a Facility Artist of the 1240 Minnesota Street Project. 

Pires Cordeiro’s art develops the relationship between fine art and design, commenting on the interaction between visual art and functional objects through experimentation in media and color. Color is his main focus, unpacking the symbolic and cultural meanings imposed on it in contemporary society by sourcing colors from trends and design forecasts as well as from particular environments or publications. He finds inspiration in modern architecture, engineering, and geometry, distilling extremely intricate concepts into distinct shapes. He works with a variety of media from painting and sculpting to film and 3D printing.

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Board Bios

Dan Toffey, President
Dan Toffey arrived in the Bay Area in 2012 to join a small startup called Instagram. He still works there today, leading a team of interdisciplinary researchers who analyze culture and trends to improve Instagram's marketing and product experiences. He and his wife Julia are avid art collectors, and look for every opportunity to turn their friends into art enthusiasts too. He first joined the SoEx board in 2019, and most recently served a three year term as Board Treasurer. A native of Philadelphia, Dan holds a BA in political science from Reed College. Prior to joining Instagram, he worked in the press offices of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, as a researcher at Reed's Early Voting Information Center and on numerous political campaigns. He lives in Oakland with his wife and daughter.

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Marc Mayer, Vice President of Growth and Outreach
Marc Mayer is an independent curator, educator, and arts administration professional and has worked at institutions including the Asian Art Museum, Art21, the New Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has spent much of his professional career cultivating new and existing audiences through innovative programming aimed to connect art, ideas, and people. A New Yorker, born and raised, Marc moved to San Francisco in 2011 and has not looked back. He has organized exhibitions, projects, and programs with artists including Jean Shin, Carrie Mae Weems, Sanaz Mazinani, Ranu Mukherjee, Mark Bradford, Young-Hae Chang, Heavy Industries, Saya Woolfalk, Lee Mingwei, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Mark Dion, and Ala Ebtekar. It is with great excitement that he lends his expertise to support Southern Exposure’s mission and work.

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Brian Singer, Secretary
Brian Singer, also known as Someguy, is a San Francisco-based artist whose studio practice and large-scale public projects address a variety of social justice issues. With a meticulous rigor and legibility informed by his experience as a graphic designer and visual communicator, Singer’s work invites critical engagement through surprising juxtapositions of media and wordplay. Ranging from intimate works on paper to international participatory projects, Singer’s practice is unified by the desire to facilitate unexpected moments of human connection. Public project examples include an 84 foot mural at Salesforce Transit Center comprised of almost 2,000 individual stencils reading, “You Are Not Alone;” as well as his “Home Street Home” series of hand painted camouflage sleeping bags. The bags are draped over metal barricades throughout San Francisco and intended to be taken by anyone in need. Singer is best known for his “1000 Journals Project,” a participatory global art exchange that has been archived in a book, a feature length documentary, and exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Brian has served on the advisory boards for the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, New Langton Arts and AIGA, the professional association for design. He currently serves on the SECA Council.

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Christy Chan, Board Member
Christy Chan is an artist, filmmaker and creative consultant who prototypes artistic platforms in order to open conversations and activate public and private spaces. Her installations, films and public art projects often invite the public to critically examine the everyday power structures and social codes that preserve white supremacy in the United States. Past projects include “Fainting Couch,” “Inside Out,” “I Still Live Here,” and “Who’s Coming to Save You?” She is best known for "Dear America," a grassroots, guerrilla public art project that projected the art works of Asian American artists onto high-rise buildings throughout the Bay Area, in response to an epidemic of anti-Asian violence. Christy’s work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital award and numerous grants. Prior to working in the arts, she served as a co-Executive Creative Director on the launch of Dove Real Beauty, a campaign that helped shepherd mainstream cultural discussion on female representation and diversity in mass media.

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Susan Krane, Treasurer
Susan Krane is a nonprofit consultant with expertise in organizational change, strategic initiatives, capacity building, and financial stabilization. She has strong experience with cross-disciplinary approaches to the arts, cultural and social issues, and with catalyzing community partnerships. Her deep personal commitment to fostering inclusive civic dialog and social change runs throughout her prior work as a museum director and curator. Krane has served as Executive Director of the Working Assumptions Foundation, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Colorado Art Museum. She was a curator at the High Museum of Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and a fellow at Walker Art Center. Krane has authored numerous publications, organized over 60 major exhibitions, ranging from Flip a Strip (an architectural competition on the adaptive reuse of strip malls) to Your Mind, This Moment: art and the practice of attention. She has served on the faculties of SUNY Buffalo, Emory University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her BA from Carleton College; MA from Columbia University; and MBA from the University of Colorado. She is an associate with ELEVEN+, an international curatorial collective; a volunteer for Chapter 510, a writing center for youth in Oakland; and a poet on the side.

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Ranu Mukherjee, Board Member
Ranu Mukherjee is an American artist of Indian and European descent who makes hybrid work in painting, moving image and installation to build new imaginative capacities. She is guided by the forces of ecology, diaspora, motherhood, and transnational feminisms. Her work has been exhibited widely, including solo projects at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; de Young Museum; Karachi Biennale 2019; Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Arts Commission; San Jose Museum of Art;  Singapore Biennial 2022 and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts among others. Ranu is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris who published her first monograph Shadowtime in 2021. She is a co-creator of the artist avatar 0rphan drift. A long-time educator, Ranu is currently a professor and Chair of Film at California College of the Arts. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the San Jose Museum of Art and is also a current board member for Bridge Live Arts. She is the proud mother of 17 year-old triplets.

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Sriba Kwadjovie Quintana, Board Member
Sriba Kwadjovie Quintana was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She began her African Diasporic dance study with the Beatriz Ross Cultural Dance Ensemble and received ballet training with the Oakland Ballet and Ballet Petit. She has performed with Bay Area-based dance companies such as Company Chaddick, Robert Moses’ Kin and Epiphany Dance Theater. In 2015, she choreographed and performed a solo piece for the opening of the "Mirage" exhibition as part of the Havana Biennial in Cuba. Her work, "The Sower," was a featured short in both the "Once Removed" exhibition at Southern Exposure in 2022 and for the San Francisco Dance Film Festival in 2023. In addition to producing her own work, Sriba is currently a dance artist with Susana Pedroso's, Arenas Dance Company. Sriba holds B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and a J.D. from John F. Kennedy School of Law. She is passionate about the intersections between art and jurisprudence and how they shape artistic practice and public engagement. Sriba is also the Intellectual Property Manager for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where she manages copyright and licensing for exhibitions, programs and products produced by the museum. She is also the proud mom to an active and precocious three-year-old. 

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Hope Mohr, Board Member

Hope Mohr (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, visual art, and language. Her work in dance, drawing, and fabric explores embodiment, feminism, gender, and queerness. For over thirty years, she has made multidisciplinary performance that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that ride just underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). She makes performance not only in theatrical contexts, but also extensively in museums and galleries. As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City and performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance (HMD). In 2010, she founded HMD's presenting program, The Bridge Project, which she ran for ten years, curating cutting-edge programs that brought artists together across difference. In 2020, she co-stewarded the organization’s transition to a model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. In 2023, Hope transitioned out of Co-Directorship; she now works as an independent artist, arts lawyer, and arts advocate. A licensed California attorney, Mohr works at the intersection of art and the solidarity economy as a Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center.  Her book, Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance, was published by the National Center for Choreography in 2020.

 

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