Meet
the Board
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BOARD MEMBER
Brian Brooks says he is always carrying "too many cameras", but that seems to be just the right number for him. Brian photographs with many formats, film as well as digital, and he is one of the preeminent Polaroid artists in the US. Brian also wears many hats: in addition to being a dedicated father and committed artist, Brian is co-owner of Underdog Film Lab, founder of the SF Instant Camera Walk ( now in its 10th year), founder of PolaconSF, and a founding member (and now Board Member) of the East Bay Photo Collective.
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BOARD MEMBER
Jessica Chen is a fine art, documentary and street photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A native Californian, Jessica was born in San Francisco and grew up in Pacifica. Early in her career, Jessica worked many jobs covering a wide spectrum of creative fields. For over a decade, she worked as an illustrator, graphic designer and web designer for notable artists, publications and art institutions. After interning at Maysles Film in Harlem, New York, and working alongside Albert Maysles and his family, Jessica fell in love with the cinéma vérité style of storytelling. She went on to work for post production studios, contributing to award winning social documentary films, such as Remnants of a War (2008) and My Perestroika (2010). She continued to work in documentary film in various roles for many years before returning to photography. You can find Jessica in her element photographing the streets, documenting daily life, social rumblings and everyday observations.
Jessica earned a B.S. in Environmental Design and a B.A. in Studio Art from UC Davis. She went on to earn a M.F.A. in Narrative and Documentary Film from Parsons at The New School in New York. Her photographs have been published and exhibited in over 50 group exhibitions in galleries and museums across the U.S. and internationally.
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BOARD TREASURER
Vince is a photo mad-scientist, exploring, experimenting, and teaching traditional photographic media, techniques and processes. In 2011 he co-founded, with Michael Shindler, Photobooth SF, the first West Coast tintype studio in over 100 years. Vince also worked in the Gallery at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, and was in-house event photographer. His long-term portrait series, Cities of Faith, now extends to four different houses of worship in San Francisco and incorporates nearly a thousand portraits.
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CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTORAnita has had a passion for cinema and photography her entire life, and has been involved with the Bay Area photo community for over two decades, through her work at Berkeley's Looking Glass Photo, and her association with various characters in the local photography scene. While she often talks about her struggle with creative blocks, she also treasures her new World’s Greatest Photographer mug, as it’s always useful to have a goal to work towards. Anita co-founded the East Bay Photo Collective with Vince Donovan in 2017 and has been delighted to help nurture its growth over the years. In addition to board and committee duties she hosts EBPCO’s monthly photo walks and oversees EBPCO’s social media presence.
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BOARD MEMBER
I’ve always been a photographer and a keeper of moments. As a child with a 110 camera photographing family vacations, with my first Nikon SLR in high school, learning B&W film processing and printing; then pursuing degrees in journalism and art from SJSU. I spent 13 years as a photojournalist all around the San Francisco Bay Area; including as staff photographer at Antioch Ledger, Valley Times and San Francisco Chronicle.
In 2002 I shifted my focus to dogs as the Dogumentarian, creating black and white documentary style dog portraits, mostly analog. Since then I have photographed hundreds of dogs, both for private commissions and book and magazine clients. I’ve had solo shows of my fine art dog photography in SF, Oakland, Palo Alto, Jackson WY and Scottsdale AZ.
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BOARD MEMBER
Malcolm Ryder was born into a family of activist artists and university professors. After becoming one of the first Black graduates of the elite Westminster Schools in Atlanta, he pioneered and completed a new degree of his own design in Visual Arts at Princeton, becoming one of its first photography graduates.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, he co-founded a student-run theater at Princeton, exhibited as a member of the City Without Walls artists' collective in Newark, then later he developed and ran the jurying system used for making grants directly to visual artists by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council on the Arts, and the NY Foundation for the Arts. In the SF/East Bay Area he joined boards for the Julia Morgan Arts Center and the Center for Critical Architecture.
Ryder had first photographed extensively in the performing arts and sports, while also doing work for designers, documentarians, and marketers. He left this conventional professional activity however, to do tech and strategy consulting, augmented by advisory or board positions with arts organizations, for over 25 years. In 2016 he resumed steady practice as a photographer.
When not photographing, he works with other artists primarily in a curatorial or editorial mode, or in collaborative projects fusing camerawork with other vehicles ranging from digital magazines, books, or galleries, to multimedia performances. His current audience and co-creators include historians, journalists, other visual artists and curators, and the communities of the landscapes seen in his photographs.
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BOARD PRESIDENT
Jenny Sampson is a Berkeley-based photographer. Her focus is wet plate collodion and traditional black and white photography. Sampson is a member of the Rolls and Tubes photographic collective. Her work has exhibited in the United States, United Kingdom and has been published in Zyzzyva, Analog Forever Magazine, BBC, GirlTalkHQ, The Hand, SHOTS Magazine, All About Photography Magazine, Lenscratch, The Guardian, The Eye of Photography, PDN and Visual Communications Quarterly. Sampson has two monographs, Skaters (2017) and Skater Girls (2020) published by Daylight Books. Skater Girls received Book of the Month from Leica Fotographie International in September 2020 and is in the Smithsonian Library Collection. The Rolls and Tubes Collective published their book, A History of Photography, in October 2021. Sampson’s photographic work is included in the Candela Collection and other private collections, and her books are included numerous public collections.
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BOARD MEMBER
Ellen Shershow is a commercial and fine arts photographer based in Oakland, California. She is widely considered the San Francisco Bay Area’s top pet photographer.
She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and her Masters of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been published and exhibited nationally. She has been profiled on NPR’s Marketplace, La Magazine and Slate, and spoke at Today at Apple as part of Apple’s photo lab. She was a resident artist at the Light Grey Art Lab Iceland Program in 2017-2019 and had a studio lab residency at Oakland Pro Arts in 2017.
Ellen previously served as President of the SF CameraWork Board of Directors. Prior to that, she served as the chair of the SF Camerawork Benefit Auction where she raised over $100,000 for this important Bay Area institution. She also served as President of the Board of Directors at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, helping to support emerging artists and provide expertise and contacts to promote their work.
Meet the Advisory Board
The Advisory Board keeps us true to our mission. They oversee EBPCO’s activities and programs and hold us to the highest standards for community involvement as well as technical and artistic excellence.
We are extremely fortunate to have this team of guiding lights, all with deep ties to the Bay Area's proud photographic roots, and all with global influence in photographic arts, education, and culture.
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Judy Dater is a Bay Area photographer and feminist. She is best known for her portraits, nudes, and self-portraits. Judy arrived in the Bay Area in 1962 and quickly became part of the community of West Coast photographers. Imogen Cunningham was particularly influential as her primary work centered on portraiture.
Judy's career has been long and varied, combining teaching, creating books, conducting workshops, making prints, videos, and photographing continually. Her work has been exhibited world-wide. In 2014 she was part of "Face It - The Photographic Portrait" at the Norton Simon Museum. In 2018, San Francisco's De Young museum exhibited "Judy Dater - Only Human", a retrospective "celebrating her achievement as a pioneering figure in 1970s feminist art and her subsequent creative evolution."
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Ann Jastrab is a photographer, educator, independent curator, editor, and writer. She is director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, as well as Editor-in-Chief of All About Photo.
Ann's MFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design led her to an extensive career as educator and curator. After ten years on the faculty of Maine Photography Workshops (now Maine Media Workshops), Ann became gallery director at Rayko Photography Center in San Francisco and made it a center of gravity for Bay Area photography. Ann is also juror or curator for many national and international events including the Seoul International Photography Festival, Fotofest, Photolucida/Critical Mass, GuatePhoto, Review Santa Fe, Medium, Palm Springs Photo Festival, Filter, and Lishui International Photography Festival in China.
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Merg Ross was born in California in 1941. The son of fine art photographer Donald Ross, Merg grew up in the community of West Coast photographers and as a youngster met many of the prominent practitioners of the day. He credits his family visits to the home of Edward Weston as the inspiration for his life in photography, and at the age of twelve began photographing with a 4x5 camera. At thirteen, Merg was represented in an exhibition of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
His first employment was in the Photography Department at the University of California, Berkeley. This was interrupted by induction into the Army in 1963 where he was initially assigned to the Army Pictorial Center in New York City and later served as battalion photographer in Thailand. Merg returned to work at the University for several years before striking out on his own as a commercial and fine art photographer. Throughout his long career, Merg Ross has shown his photographs in many one-man and group shows and his work resides in several museums including the George Eastman House, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Center for Creative Photography, Yale University Art Gallery and the Princeton University Art Museum, David H. McAlpin Collection. http://www.mergross.com/
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Jan Watten is a photographer, curator, and the founder of Gray Loft Gallery in Oakland, CA. She was born and raised in Oakland and studied at the California College of the Arts. Jan established a studio in Oakland's Jingletown more than 30 years ago and has seen that neighborhood go through decades of changes.
Believing that art is, "a vehicle for communication, community building and inspiration," Jan turned her loft space into Gray Loft Gallery in 2012. Gray Loft was voted Best Art Gallery in 2016 and 2017 in the Oakland Magazine Readers’ Choice Awards. Art critic Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle called Gray Loft Gallery “…A space gaining prominence in the Bay Area…”. http://www.grayloftgallery.com/
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Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz where he taught for 14 years and before that at UC Berkeley. He is the co-author of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” 2006, 2017 and “New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition” UC Press 2013. He holds his BA in Political Science and his MA in Photography and Design from the University of California, Berkeley.
Lewis's work centers around the cultural landscape, primarily in communities occupied by people of African descent. Lewis's parents’ southern background enlightens much of his research into the great migration from the rural South to the urban North. He began photographing the Fillmore in the early 1990s, and put together the archival photographs for the Fillmore Center’s Fillmore Historical Panel Project. Lewis's work has been exhibited at and/or is in the collections of: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Citè de La Musique, Paris France, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn and the Newburger Museum of Art, Purchase NY among others. https://lewiswatts.sites.ucsc.edu/