Stephen Shafer Mazow, Executive Director at Z Space, is a writer, theater artist, fundraiser, and activist living in San Francisco and working in program development and strategic initiatives at the intersection of art, science, and social justice.

Prior to joining Z Space as Managing Director in 2018, Shafer was Senior Grants Manager at the Exploratorium and Director of Institutional Giving and Strategy at American Conservatory Theater. He serves on the Boards of the National Queer Theater and Theatre Bay Area. He leads the trans and gender-non-conforming advocacy and empathy project I.P.Freely; and has helped to establish space-sharing initiatives, community-based theater programs, and research and action initiatives to address gender equity in the non-profit theater field. He was a founding member of the gender-bending sketch comedy troupe This Side of Butch. Most recently, he has partnered with exhibit designers and educators to develop and lead a series of temporal experiences in public restrooms that uses participatory practice, immersive theater, and inquiry-based learning to extend awareness and understanding of issues people face when they don’t “look” like they belong to a space or a group.

Shafer holds a B.A. in English from Wellesley College and a M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from Mills College and has focused professional and creative efforts on deepening understanding of gender, its complex intersections with other aspects of identity, and the implications of oversimplified binary categories.

Eric Garcia (he/him) is a San Francisco-based devised dance-theater artist, drag queen, community organizer, and the Co-Director of Detour. He creates immersive and site-responsive performances that straddle nostalgia, radical futurism, collaborative ensembles, and queer maximalism. He has worked with men in detention, senior adults, trans and queer youth, drag performers, and self-identified non-dancers on various dance films and live performance projects. Eric is rooted in the queer nightlife and drag performance scene as Churro Nomi, and produces/hosts Clutch The Pearls, a drag cabaret on the first Sunday of every month at Make-Out Room in the Mission District. Since 2010, Eric proudly serves as Managing Director for both Fresh Meat Productions and the SF Transgender Film Festival. He is a guest lecturer and choreographer at the University of San Francisco’s Performing Arts and Social Justice Department, is on the board of directors for the Embodiment Project, and is a founding member of the Latinx/Hispanic Dancers United Caucus.

Photo credit: Melissa Lewis

Leigh is a theatre performer, dramaturg, director, and producer who has worked widely both within the Bay Area and national industry. They attended Wellesley College and were a member of Oakland's Laney College Fusion Theatre Project. Leigh is on staff as Shotgun Players’ Associate Artistic Director and Crowded Fire Theater’s Director of Artistic Programming & Marketing, where they host a recurring Twitch Stream and are also a Resident Artist. They are also an Artistic Company Member at Shotgun and Oakland Theater Project, Casting Director with the Casting Collective, and Producing Director at The Forum Collective. Leigh has had the immense pleasure of working at dozens of local companies, including Aurora Theatre, Curran, Magic Theatre, New Conservatory Theatre Center, PlayGround, Playwrights Foundation, TheatreFIRST, and West Edge Opera. While Leigh wears many hats as a theatre-maker, much of their work and personal passion has been to shift the industry and its culture to be more equitable, inclusive, accessible, and sustainable. Outside of theater, Leigh enjoys swimming, reading, going to concerts, crafting cocktails, and cuddling their dog Langston.

Jenifer K Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work investigates hybridity, history, calamity and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is also 1/3 of the Filipina-American artist trio M.O.B.

Her work has been exhibited at venues including SFMOMA, the Asian Art Museum, BAMPFA, Oakland Museum of California, YBCA, San Jose Museum of Art and Southern Exposure. She has also shown at Asia Society (Houston), Wing Luke Museum (Seattle), DePaul Museum (Chicago), Frieze (Los Angeles), Silverlens Galleries (Manila), and Osage Galleries (Hong Kong).

Wofford was a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree and a 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her other awards include the Eureka Fellowship, the Murphy Fellowship, and grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Art Matters Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has also been artist-in-residence at Lucas Artist Residency (Saratoga), The Living Room (Philippines), Liguria Study Center (Italy) and KinoKino (Norway).

Wofford teaches in the Fine Arts and Philippine Studies programs of the University of San Francisco. She has also led courses at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Mills, SFAI, California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University. She holds degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and UC Berkeley (MFA).

Born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia and the Bay Area, Wofford has also lived in Oakland and Prague in addition to San Francisco. A committed and active member of the Bay Area art community, Wofford was Vice President of the Board of Directors of Southern Exposure.

Ruthie Dineen is a pianist, composer, bilingual teaching artist, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She grew up in the Bay Area; her mother’s family is Salvadoran and her fathers’ Irish-American. She has worked at East Bay Center for the Performing Arts since 2009 as both staff and faculty and believes strongly in the transformative power of the arts, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural artistic study and performance, and community-based arts towards racial justice.

Ruthie is a founding member and co-leader of two original music ensembles, Negative Press Project and RDL+, with whom she performs, tours, arranges, and composes regularly, as well as a member of Bay Area Latin group Bululú. From 2015-2019 RDL+ hosted the monthly series “Bay Area Bridges” at Studio Grand in Oakland, CA, where Dineen collaborated with different performing artists each month creating new works of art (including theater, music, dance, poetry, and visual art).

Ruthie has been involved in several community-driven initiatives, serving on the Executive, Sustainability, and Steering Committees of Healthy Contra Costa, and a member of the Invest in Youth Coalition in Richmond, and the planning group for the Blueprint to Prevent Interpersonal Violence in Contra Costa County. She is currently the Executive Director at East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, and is deeply committed to the expression of youth voice through the arts, while supporting a vibrant artist community.

ruthiedineen.com

Nadhi Thekkek is the Artistic Director of Nava Dance Theatre, a bharatanatyam dance company based in San Francisco. Nadhi uses the south Indian dance form to navigate place, identity, and politics through the lens of her lived experience as a child of immigrants and an unapologetic South Asian, diasporic woman.

Nadhi’s work has been supported through New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Grant, Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Arts Grants, Dancers’ Group CA$H Grants, California Arts Council, CounterPulse, East Bay Community Foundation, CHIME by Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and others. Nadhi has performed at various venues; Scotiabank Dance Centre (Vancouver), La Mama Experimental Theatre Club (NYC), Dance Place (D.C.), and Southbank Center (London). She has also worked as a freelancer with Sujit Vaidya (Vancouver), Seeta Patel (London), Randee Paufve (Oakland).

She is currently touring Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies an exploration of the transnational paid and unpaid labor of South Asian women in the diaspora and Broken Seeds Still Grow, an exploration of ancestry and an examination of cultural othering during the 1947 Partition of British India, co-created by Nadhi and visual artist Rupy C. Tut. Other recent works include Unfiltered, a bharatanatyam work exploring the #metoo movement in collaboration with Rasika Kumar and Sahasra Sambamoorthi; Hamsa, a bharatanatyam and ballet collaboration with Graham Lustig, Artistic Director of the Oakland Ballet, and others.

Some of Nadhi’s artist initiatives include the Unrehearsed (Virtual) Artist Residency Program, where artists create art that challenges the status quo in South Asian dance and offer public events engaging the South Asian community in urgent social justice issues. She is one of the co-founders of Varnam Salon, a dance series highlighting traditional arts repertoire and local dance makers. Nadhi is on the board of the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) and serves as a co-chair of the WAA Hyphen + Asian affinity group.