Our Team
PLACE is guided by a team of alumni facilitators, artists, and community leaders who have each completed the PLACE process themselves. This first-hand experience grounds our work in empathy, accountability, and care. Our team brings diverse backgrounds in the arts, education, healing, and community service, and shares a commitment to holding brave, creative spaces rooted in trust, cultural awareness, and mutual support.
Place Alumni Anchors
Ahran Lee
A 1.5 Korean American personal liberation coach, facilitator, multidisciplinary artist, and speaker based in Oakland, California. Cultivating interconnectedness and kinship is central to her work as a coach, artist, and community leader.
Julie Lee Andersen
An integrative Bodywork Consultant, Visual Artist, and Curator with over three decades of creative and community-based Practice in the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California, running exhibitions, a gallery, and art-making residencies across the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Valley, and China.
Jme McLean
A collaborative leader, lifelong learner, and entrepreneurial spirit committed to advancing freedom for all. As a woman of multigenerational mixed heritage, she believes creativity is essential for success in all facets of life.
Reyna r.a.d. DauDian
A multimedia dream-weaver artibista, a twin born in Luzon to Bisayan parents from Cebu and Bohol, Philippines, as Vision Holder of Balik sa Dagat Bangka Journey led to kommunity building a World Bangka to celebrate halo-halo indigenous resistance. r.a.d misses the late kitty Bestie Betsie.
Patricia Ann Zamora
“My creative life embodies a healing practice that happens one Womxn at a time. One Womxn can heal a family, a community, a world. Through individual and collective action, destructive cycles can be changed to practices that allow for self-liberation and empowerment.”
Erika Powell
I bring creative bodies of work to life through experiences that spark insight, connection, and transformation. As a facilitator and coach, I design spaces where people can step into new possibilities—blending structure with artistry, and strategy with imagination. I also help others design workshops & curriculum that reflect their unique creative vision and voice.
Tracy Nguyen
A community organizer and visual storyteller dedicated to uplifting marginalized voices. With a background spanning nonprofits, creative freelancing, and corporate tech, she is a student of life, seeking for the peace and joy her Vietnamese refugee parents and ancestors dreamed up for her.
Place Alumni Circle
Christina Yang
A 1.5 Korean American personal liberation coach, facilitator, multidisciplinary artist, and speaker based in Oakland, California. Cultivating interconnectedness and kinship is central to her work as a coach, artist, and community leader.
Martha Zamora
“When I joined Place, I knew I was on the path to learn how to live and thrive in a different way than what I had been told and shown. It isn’t always easy at 70 years old, but it's a lot harder the “old way!”
Norma Cerrera
30 years ago, she left her life with an alcoholic father and domestic violence. She arrived in the US and could not speak English. With incredible determination, she works diligently to improve her environment, family, and community by speaking truths and pursuing dreams.
Jazz Diaz
Merced-based visual artist Jazz Diaz (she/her) explores community and personal healing through murals, printmaking, illustration, and digital art. Her work reflects her Salvadoran heritage and her journey to reconnect with the ancestral land and culture of her parents from El Salvador.
Tomo Hirai
A Shin-Nisei Japanese American born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a reporter for the Nichi Bei News in San Francisco and a freelance diversity consultant for tabletop games. Her work has also appeared on Anime Feminist and the sci-fi tabletop RPG Hard Wired Island.
Emily Yamauchi
A Shin-Nisei writer, graphic novelist, filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. She uses prose, hybrid and visual-text mediums, comics, collage, journaling, installations, and illustrations to tell stories that connect with others and create spaces for accessing vulnerability and authenticity.
Cueponcaxochitl Moreno Sandoval
“My creative life embodies a healing practice that happens one Womxn at a time. One Womxn can heal a family, a community, a world. Through individual and collective action, destructive cycles can be changed to practices that allow for self-liberation and empowerment.”
Manon Wada
An artist based in New York City on Canarsie Munsee Lenape land. Her art practice is engaged with relational works at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and video. In tandem, she often works collaboratively and on socially engaged projects.
Katie Quan
A third-generation Chinese American born and raised on Ramaytush Ohlone land (San Francisco). She is a comic and zine artist, community advocate, and educator. Coming from a long line of teachers and artists, her work explores the complexities of Asian America, addressing themes like identity, mental health, and family.
Jessica Ko
A queer disabled second-generation Chinese American artist born and raised in Oakland Chinatown. She is an emerging multimedia artist whose work explores intuition, generational healing, somatic release, and vulnerability through a playful and intentional practice.
Advisory Board
Cris Matos
Is a Puerto Rican/ San Francisco Sonero Singer, Songwriter for Manicato. Guidance since 2009: Art Construction, Consultant, Translation, Installation Lead, Documentation, fluent in Spanish. Cris is also a fine art photographer, painter, mixed media collage and installation artist.
Deborah Santana
An author, business manager, film producer and activist for peace and social justice. Her non-profit, Do A Little, serves women and girls in the areas of health, education, and happiness. With a passion to provide educational opportunities for girls and women, Ms. Santana collaborates with organizations that work to prevent and heal relationship and sexual violence, and improve the lives of America's abused and neglected children.
Ravi Chandra, MD
A Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He has a private practice in San Francisco. A graduate of Brown University and Stanford University Medical School, he completed a psychiatry residency at UCSF. He has interests in film, creative writing, and spirituality.
Bronwyn Shaunessy
A naturopath, herbalist in the New South Wales AU, for about 35 years. Using a holistic approach to herbal medicine and wellbeing, considering physical, emotional and energetic health.
She began practicing SoulCollage® in 2014 and in 2018, became the SoulCollage® Trainer for Australia and parts of Asia.
Barbara Mumby-Huerta
A Narrative Shifter: using the arts to challenge inaccurate and outdated perceptions of Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized groups. She believes the arts to be a powerful tool for survival and an instrument to unite communities and move public policy. As a figurative oil painter, Barbara approaches each piece of work to tell a visual story; where the subject’s history is embedded, either overtly or subversively, into the fabric of the work.
Amy Grace Lam, Ph.D
Community Mental Health, Consultant, a poet-playwright-musician, mother, community advocate, and vibrational energy healer. Her life’s work is dedicated to personal and collective healing. Amy’s art creates healing experiences where people experience a bridge between their physical and spiritual realities.
Antonio Salazar Hobson J.D.
Attorney and Art Advocate, Legal, Philanthropist. A 30-year art collector of original Mexican paintings, as well as American art by artists of color.
Specializes in representing unions, tribes and cultural workers of international importance and with established legacies in their respective field / Served as the Controller of the California Democratic Party (“CDP”), and dedicates fundraising skills to non profits.
Katherine Poss J.D.
Attorney and Art Advocate, Board Member of Cultural Odyssey Expertise in trademark portfolio development and protection, including corporate rebranding, on-line and print copyright protection. Dedicated to community service, she is a board member of La Raza Centro Legal-8 years, nonprofit providing legal services to monolingual Spanish speaking San Franciscans and of Cultural Odyssey, an internationally renowned performance nonprofit working with women in jails and prisons in the US and South Africa to tell their stories.
Acknowledgements
Everyone has worn so many hats that it's impossible to list their generous talent. We are here because of them. It takes a village.
Jill Shiraki, Diana Li, Angela Han, Maggie Yee, Ed Fung, Brian Garvey, Kira Ballota of Cantadora Wine, Nora Taranowski, Reiko Fujii, Christina Yu LSW, Nina Moore, Karen Larson, Natalie Sacramento, Martha Richards, Kelsey Elizabeth Myers, Trinity Ordona, Hediana Utarti, Sylvia Lafair
Development and
Fiscal Guidance
Shari Arai DeBoer
Irene Wibawa
Advocates
Renee Baldocchi
Avotcja
Susan Almazol
Marianne Owens
Erin Kane
Jonathan Farrell
Photographers &
Videographers
Cris Matos
Curtis Tom
Gregorio Rocha-Tabera
Jordon Briggs
Reiko Fujii
Lenore Chinn
Laura Wong
Thomas Schumake
Mido Lee
J.W. Diehl
Teresa Jade LeYung
Ancestral Advisors
who continue to guide our way
Janet King (Native Health Services)
Sue Tom
Diana Lew
Rene Yanez (SOMArts)
Do A Little Fund - D.Santan
J-Sei Cultural Center/City of Emeryville
Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center
Zellerbach Family Foundation
Center for Cultural Innovation
WomenArts Harmony Project/ Nathan Cummings Foundation
Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area Coalition (PAAWBAC)
The Koehn Family Foundation
Partners
PLACE is sustained through long-standing relationships with cultural organizations, community groups, artists, advisors, and funders who believe in the power of art as a tool for healing and social change. Our partners support PLACE in many ways, through emotional encouragement, collaboration, exhibition venues, publicity, funding, and shared community care.
Fiscal Sponsors
Cantadora Wines
The labels tell the stories of extraordinary women giving back in novel and profound ways to our shared community. Each wine donates 10% of the sales to the organizations the women have founded.
Community partners (Cont’d)
7GEN (Central Valley)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
De Young Museum’s Public Programs
Avotcja at KPOO and KPFA (PLACE artist)
Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC)
Marin Museum of Contemporary Art
Asian Women's Shelter
Boys & Girls Clubs of SF
WomenArts.org – Harmony Project
Thoreau Center for Sustainability
Driftwood Gallery
Manilatown
API Legal Outreach
Bhutanese/Nepali Women’s Refugee Collective
Funders
Funded in part by
Community Partners
