Executive Director

SF Camerawork announces the appointment of Aay Preston-Myint as Executive Director. Preston-Myint will begin in their new role January 1, 2023.

Aay Preston-Myint (they/them) is a Bay Area-based artist, educator, and curator with over 20 years of experience in arts administration, justice and equity work, and programming. Preston-Myint comes to SF Camerawork from the Headlands Center for the Arts, where they have served as Senior Manager of Public Programs and Fellowships since 2018.

Preston-Myint is also currently Adjunct Faculty of Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts. They are also on the Board of Directors of Small Traffic Press and a member of Southern Exposures’ Curatorial Council as well as Oakland’s Real Time and Space collective art studio.

We invite you to read our press release to get to know Aay better.

Aay can be reached at aay@sfcamerawork.org

Gallery Manager

Joanna Knutsen (she/her) is a photographer and arts professional from San Francisco. She graduated from New York University with a major in Art History and a minor in Anthropology. Before joining SF Camerawork, Joanna was a Digital Marketing Specialist at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco and a Work Scholar at Aperture Foundation in New York. Her own photographic work is interested in the impressions and histories of natural landscapes.

Joanna can be reached at joanna@sfcamerawork.org

President

Artist and Assistant Professor Art & Art History, Stanford University

Jonathan Calm (he/him) is a visual artist in the media of photography and video, represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and assistant professor at Stanford University.

Jonathan was the 2019 recipient of the prestigious Headlands Center for the Arts Larry Sultan Photography Award in partnership with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and Pier 24 Photography.

The KQED Arts profile Jonathan Calm Revisits ‘Green Book’ Locations in Search of America’s Past and Present was nominated for a 2020 Northern California Area Emmy Award for Best Historic/Cultural-Feature/Segment.

Secretary

Individual Giving Officer, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive

Alexis Gordon (she/her) is a fundraising professional and a collector of contemporary photography. She is currently the Individual Giving Officer at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Previously, she has been a fundraiser for the San Francisco Symphony, SFJAZZ and The Contemporary Jewish Museum. She has served on the Board of Directors of SF Camerawork since 2016 and has been involved with the annual auction since 2015.

Treasurer

CPA, Managing Partner, Hood & Strong

Susan Malone (she/her) is the managing partner of Hood & Strong LLP, and an active member of the Firm’s Not-for-Profit Service Group. Susan's client involvement is exclusively with not-for-profit organizations and she has more than 30 years of experience in public accounting.

Sr. Art Director

Brooke Farrington is a Sr. Art Director with two decades in the fashion and advertising industries. She has worked with new, emerging and heritage brands over her career and provides creative leadership on and off set. Brooke is trained in photography and is most inspired by her collaborations with other artists in the creative community.

She is a collector of modern and contemporary photographs and her personal work focuses on portraiture and editorial storytelling. She often gives back to the community by supporting non-profit organizations as well as emerging brands/ small businesses with her photography. Brooke is a Bay Area native and lives and works in Oakland, Ca.

Artist and Stanford University Lecturer

Through a multidisciplinary art practice that spans photography, video, and site installations, Jamil Hellu’s work focuses on themes of identity, visibility, and cultural heritage, while expressing a shift towards a world beyond binaries. Navigating from a personal lens, his projects weave together strategies of performance and photographic representation to point to the tensions found in the evolving discourse about sexuality.

Born in Brazil, Hellu holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Art Practice from Stanford University and a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute.

He is a Photography Lecturer in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. An active member in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community, Hellu serves as an advisory board member for Recology’s Artist-in-Residence Program.

Whitney Lawson studied photography at Yale as an undergraduate and worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum before a 20-year career in publishing where she was a photo editor at The New Yorker, New York, Travel + Leisure, and did photo projects for T (the New York Times Style Magazine), Elle Décor, and Hearst Design Group. Now in her “nonprofit era,” she is the president of the board of directors at Millay Arts and is the chair of the Capital Campaign committee at Greenwich House Pottery in New York City. She is studying to get a masters degree in Nonprofit Management at Columbia University.