About
Future Finds is a fictional store selling artifacts of ecological remnants from the Bay Area, set in the Year 2100. We will be populating the store front with artifacts that engage with the Bay Area ecosystem, contributed by artists and presented as rare, nostalgic ecological samples.
The Future Finds storefront will be activated by a series of talks, performances and workshops focused on the possible futures of Bay Area ecology from different intersectional lenses.
This exhibition is supported by Bathers Library and Justin Carder.
Curation and production led by L. Song Wu, K. Sid Zhang and Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert.
Events
In addition to the store front art exhibition, Future Finds also curates a series of lectures and workshops related to the themes of the exhibition on weekends across the duration of the project.
FAQs
Q: How do I access the talks?
A: You can purchase a Season Pass (60 USD) to access the lectures throughout the month; this also comes with access to all six (6) talks happening on Jan 24, Jan 31 and Feb 7. You will also get three (3) limited edition 4” x 6” postcards.
Q: What if I only want to attend to one of the days?
A: There will be a limited number of tickets released before each day and walk ups at the door to the talks, based on seat availability.Q: How do I participate in the art workshops?
A: Workshops are add-ons and not included in the passes. You do not need a pass to reserve a seat in the workshop. Workshops are subject to cancellation if a minimum number of participants is not reached (full refunds will be issued for any cancelled workshops).Q: Ok, I purchased the passes. Where do I attend these events?
A: All lectures and workshops will take place indoors at Bathers Library. We recommend masking for all indoor events.Q: I see that there are some performances listed, how do I purchase a ticket to experience this?
A: The performance is currently being developed on-site. We will make tickets available in early February :)!Q: These passes are cost-prohibitive. Is there a way for me to still attend some talks and workshops?
A: We practice a no one turned away for lack of funds policy. Please email bkongtav[at]stanford.edu if cost poses a barrier and we will figure something out.Events Calendar
1.17
5 - 8 pm
Opening Reception
Join us in the celebrarion of the opening of Future Finds!
10 am - 12 pm
Workshop:
Mussel Memory
Kea Kahoilua Clebsch
Mussel Memory is a two-hour workshop exploring the resiliency of the mussel population in the Bay Area. Participants will create casts of mussel shells on clay bed and plaster, while learning about the history of the ecological system along the California Coast.
Limited to 12 participants • $30 (materials included)
Kea Kahoilua Clebsch is artist from the island of Hawaiʻi. Her art practice is grounded in a love for her ancestors and ʻohana, who she gets to honor and know more deeply through her work. Primarily working in oil paint, Kea's art opens portals to her history, where she momentarily lives with and learns from the kānaka who precede her. Contrasting moments of clarity and dream-like haze, Kea moves in and out of touch with her subjects until land and body are indiscernible, emphasizing the ways kānaka, our histories, and our political movements are embedded in land. Her practice aims to carve space for her ʻohana's moʻolelo in visual canons, honoring the strength of her predecessors who each resist in their own right. Kea is currently studying Art Practice at Stanford University with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
5 - 7 pm
Cultural Memory Workshop
Danielle Siembieda
Read. Create. Comment.
The Cultural Commentary Project is a participatory art initiative designed to transform public and community spaces into forums for civic dialogue and creative response. Danielle Siembieda leads community sessions where participants of all ages and backgrounds can create visual responses to policies that shape their lives. Tables with accessible materials will support artmaking, while listening and reading stations will provide policy documents, related artworks, and critical perspectives. The project culminates in an evolving public exhibition and serve as a translator of complex policies, a catalyst for dialogue, and a living record of shared concerns.
Danielle Siembieda is a systems artist working at the intersection of emerging technology, climate science, and community. Her practice translates institutional critique into actionable climate strategy, including a nationally recognized Carbon Art Program with the City of San José. She has garnered significant support for this work, including funding from Silicon Valley Energy Watch, and has applied her approach in partnership with the City of San Francisco and institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Siembieda has served as an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz Genomics Institute—home of the Genome Browser—where her contributions were further advanced through UCSC’s Arts Research Open Lab. Her work has been presented internationally, from the 01SJ Biennial in Silicon Valley to the National Gallery in Copenhagen and the CYLAND International Festival.
Siembieda holds an MFA in Digital Media Art from San José State University’s CADRE Media Art Lab, with a focus on green technology and sustainable materials. She also plays a civic role in strengthening the creative economy and cultural engagement in Silicon Valley through her work with the City of San José. Her tenure as Chief Creative Officer of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) reflects sustained leadership at the convergence of art, science, and public impact.
7 - 8 pm
On Futurities
Kola Heyward-Rotimi
When the future is spoken of in an aspirational tone, it gains a lot of constructive power that is assumed to be a positive force. In this talk, we will look at examples of futurity in different urban configurations, and how visions of a world yet-to-come are used as tools by people in the present day. In the context of contemporary life, concepts like worldbuilding and speculative subgenres like Afrofuturism become ambiguous in terms of who they are meant to support and what they aim to build. What are the material effects of “envisioning the future”? How does futurity as a tool shape the places we live?.
Kola Heyward-Rotimi is a writer and PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, researching virtuality and the influence it has on urban environments. Currently, Kola's work focuses on smart city projects, particularly how computer simulations and the narrativization of climate change factor into their construction. He aims to delineate how the roles of speculative fiction, scenario planning, speculative finance, and architecture converge to validate the development of multibillion-dollar projects.
Kola's fiction has been nominated for the Nommo Awards and the BSFA Awards, and can be found in Logic(s), Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and more. Recurrent themes across his fiction include climate change, the entanglement of magic and technology, and depictions of Black queerness that are critical of mainstream Afrofuturist tropes.
5 - 6 pm
Tropical Futurism
Anastasha Rachel Gunawan
Ancient tropical systems constitute sophisticated technologies for managing climate over long durations. Drawing from community-based practices and spiritual pillar systems from Indonesia and Myanmar that birthed resilient systems, Anastasha challenges one-dimensional definitions of innovation and technology today that privilege efficiency, speed, and control.
Engaging a tropical lens, what counts as technological success when we adopt a different metric system? What do we lose when we reward short-term optimization? Who awards legitimacy, and what path can we build for reconciliation between ancient spiritual cultures and modern socio-technical contexts?
Anastasha explores how histories of technology are constructed, whose knowledge is archived, and what kinds of technologies we want to endure.
Anastasha Rachel Gunawan is anIndonesian artist and technologist, born and raised in Southeast Asia, whose practice explores speculative relationships with technology in tropical worlds and futures. Spanning interactive artifacts, teaching, and worldbuilding, her work draws from Southeast Asian material and spiritual cultures to dig for new rhetoric and imagination. She is currently an MS Design student at Stanford with a focus on designing for emerging technologies.
6 - 7 pm
History and Stories of Climate Migration
Rwaida Gharib
How do we live in a drowning world? To live on a changing planet is to navigate the tension between mitigation, adaptation and migration: how do we decide when to repair, mend, or restart anew?
Rwaida Gharib is a PhD student in Environment and Resources at Stanford’s School of Sustainability. Her research focuses on the international policy frameworks shaping climate adaptation and mobility, with an emphasis on environmental justice for displaced communities, rural populations, and women and girls. She examines how global institutions respond to climate vulnerability—and how they can better support frontline communities.
Her current work spans climate displacement and adaptation efforts in the Global South, grounded in field research across East Africa and Central America. She examines how narrative structures, legal categorization, and language shape relationships with nature and influence how climate risks and resilience are interpreted within policy and institutional settings.
She brings over 15 years of experience in international development and humanitarian policy, including advisory roles with the World Bank Group, USAID, and UNDP, and an appointment in the Obama Administration, where she helped design the White House’ clean energy initiative, Power Africa. Currently, she supports adaptation finance research at Stanford's Sustainable Finance Institute as well as the Graduate School of Business’s Ecopreneurship Program.
5 - 6 pm
California’s Food Sovereignty
Elias Aveces + Song Wu
Mussel Memory is a two-hour workshop exploring the resiliency of the mussel population in the Bay Area. Participants will create casts of mussel shells on clay bed and plaster, while learning about the history of the ecological system along the California Coast.
| Elias Aveces is the founder and research director of the Plurinational Land Reform in CA Working Group. The group emerged in 2023 as a grassroots collective of students & researchers seeking to bridge the gap between (farm)working and professional classes. It takes inspiration from the tactical innovations plus lessons which indigenous-peasant movements based in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile have experimented with to advance what they have coined as "plurinationalism". Aveces holds a MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. |
| L. Song Wu is a figurative painter originally from Tampa, Florida, currently dividing her time between Northern California and Milan. Her paintings explore the tension between intimacy and alienation, challenging viewers to confront their own sense of belonging and constructions of place and femininity. Drawing on sources such as anime, YouTube thumbnails, and memory, Wu creates a meticulously crafted world that refracts her ideas of place and self in today’s dizzying contemporary landscape. Wu’s work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She has been selected as a finalist for the AXA Art Prize and the Tournesol Award. |
7 - 8:30 pm
beyond a thermodyanmic energy future: taoist natural philosophy, qi, science (&) fiction
Kelsey Chen + Wendi Yan
What is energy? In this conversation, artist-researchers Kelsey Chen and Wendi Yan examine competing conceptions and mistranslations of qi, Taoist scientific imaginaries, and practices of synthetic biology and biodesign, situating these frameworks within the energetic logics that underpin the futurisms of the Bay Area.
Kelsey Chen (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford and a multidisciplinary artist. In her scholarly work, she studies speculative and science fiction grounded in scientific/technical traditions outside of a Western techno-science, focusing on _silkpunk_ and Taoist scientific imaginaries. In her art practice, she is dedicated to trying to picture the true form of things, particularly those which are typically occluded or diffused (hyperobjects), working across painting, sculpture, weaving, book-making, and performance.
Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI, game engines, and documentary practices to probe and play with the artifice of knowledge. She also collaborates frequently with scientists and engineers, from synthetic biology to astrophysics, to explore the frontier between science and fiction, between imaging and imagining. She was an inaugural Steve Jobs Archive Fellow and the 6th VH Award Grand Prix recipient.
5 - 7 pm Workshop:
Handmade Pigments From Natural Materials
Catherine Wang McMahon
Join artist Catherine Wang McMahon for a hands-on workshop creating handground pigments from locally sourced natural materials. Participants will learn to transform charcoal, oyster shells, redwood bark, and serpentinite into natural pigments and take home their own jar of handmade color.
Catherine will demonstrate practical techniques for grinding and preparing pigments while sharing the histories and ecological significance of each material. Charcoal connects to California’s cultural burns and the history of fire on the land. Oyster shells reflect coastal ecosystems and cultural heritage. Redwood bark honors California’s iconic trees, and serpentinite reveals the geological forces shaping the region.
This workshop offers participants both practical skills and a deeper understanding of the natural and cultural stories embedded in these materials, fostering a mindful, hands-on connection to art, ecology, and place.
Limited to 20 participants • $40 (materials included)
Catherine Wang McMahon (b. 1999, San Francisco, CA, USA; they/she) is a queer, biracial Chinese-American artist whose practice began at age five at Xing Xing Art Studio in San Francisco. They hold a BFA in Studio Art from New York University.
Shaped by their multicultural family, with a mother from China, a stepdad from India, a stepmom from Brazil, and a father who is a Vietnam War veteran and son of Italian and Irish immigrants, Catherine’s work explores the complexities of kinship through ecological and transgenerational landscapes. They aim to challenge dominant narratives and legacies of extraction, exploitation, and destruction across borders and barriers. Their site-specific works are grounded in a belief in the life force of nature (氣, qi, प्राण, prana, força vital).
Working with handground pigments on unstretched, grommeted paintings, their practice rejects the 15th-century European invention of the stretched canvas as a vehicle for Renaissance illusionism and draws instead from the format and fluid spatial logic of traditional Asian watercolor landscape scrolls from the 10th to 14th centuries. The work’s adaptability echoes protest architecture such as tents and temporary shelters and the site-specific ethos of 1960s and 70s Land Art. Emphasizing mobility and impermanence, the practice engages traditions that challenge fixed boundaries and the Western art canon’s codification of painting.
2.21
7:30 pm
7:30 pm
2.22
8:30 pm
8:30 pm
K. Sid Zhang
| Devised on-site at Future Finds, this immersive physical theatre performance meditates on the storefront as a portal connecting different points in time. As the gift shop program comes to a close, the show interacts with the ephemeral representation of space and questions the material presence of what surrounds us, tracing the jittery contours of a vulnerable environment somewhere down a butterfly effect. The show will be developed as a site-specific project for the duration of Future Finds. More information will be discovered soon. |
K. Sid Zhang is a director, dancer, and poet from Nanjing, China and currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She searches for space between words and their silence and creates visual poetry out of interdisciplinary, movement-based performances.
Sid received a BA (Hons) in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with a Minor in Creative Writing (poetry). She is a recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts. She is a former member of the Chocolate Heads Movement Band. Her work has been presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, and Stanford University. Sid directs, designs, crafts, and sometimes thinks. She performs when needed.
Artists & Speakers
Featured Artists
Alice Grace is a recent graduate of Art Practice from Stanford University. Her interdisciplinary practice spans music, printmaking, sculpture, and performance art. She is most alive when she combines these modalities to create ritualistic art objects and interactive performances for her communities. Anastasha Rachel Gunawan is anIndonesian artist and technologist, born and raised in Southeast Asia, whose practice explores speculative relationships with technology in tropical worlds and futures. Spanning interactive artifacts, teaching, and worldbuilding, her work draws from Southeast Asian material and spiritual cultures to dig for new rhetoric and imagination. She is currently an MS Design student at Stanford with a focus on designing for emerging technologies. BEAM is a research studio for climate transition. Founded by Annie Chen and Zoe Lee, BEAM addresses the climate crisis as both a planetary emergency and a cultural inflection point—requiring new and emergent forms of connective tissue between science, technology, ecology, and society.
BEAM’s work has been supported by NASA, NOAA, MIT Media Lab, MIT Open Documentary Lab, SeaAhead VC, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and more. Bonwoo Kuh is an Oakland based interdisciplinary artist and researcher where they often examine trans and diasporic identities through time, body, and place. They work primarily with mixed media installations blending archival practices and material with traditional art techniques. Catherine Wang McMahon (b. 1999, San Francisco, CA, USA; they/she) is a queer, biracial Chinese-American artist whose practice began at age five at Xing Xing Art Studio in San Francisco. They hold a BFA in Studio Art from New York University. Shaped by their multicultural family, Catherine’s work explores the complexities of kinship through ecological and transgenerational landscapes. They aim to challenge dominant narratives and legacies of extraction, exploitation, and destruction across borders and barriers. Their site-specific works are grounded in a belief in the life force of nature (氣, qi, प्राण, prana, força vital). Working with handground pigments on unstretched, grommeted paintings, their practice rejects the 15th-century European invention of the stretched canvas as a vehicle for Renaissance illusionism and draws instead from the format and fluid spatial logic of traditional Asian watercolor landscape scrolls from the 10th to 14th centuries. Emphasizing mobility and impermanence, the practice engages traditions that challenge fixed boundaries and the Western art canon’s codification of painting. Each of Cyan D’Anjou’s creative projects begins with a question—an invitation to introspect on the values that govern how we navigate contemporary environments: What would we save if the internet were wiped clean annually? What if we gave more to nature than we took? How would we understand memory in a world where nothing is forgotten? She materializes potential answers by writing speculative manifestos and societal principles for participatory alternative realities to unfold. Rooted in uncovering each-time-altered stories of her own family’s global migrations, her work is invested in articulating intangible losses in translation when traveling between worlds–both digital and physical.
With a background in technology design and innovation ethics from Stanford and RCA, she creates tactile experiences around AI, robotics, and media technology’s growing presence in our everyday and the subsequent anthropologic changes that follow. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou’s IRCAM, Dutch Design Week, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Ars Electronica. Danielle Siembieda is a systems artist working at the intersection of emerging technology, climate science, and community. Her practice translates institutional critique into actionable climate strategy, including a nationally recognized Carbon Art Program with the City of San José. She has garnered significant support for this work, including funding from Silicon Valley Energy Watch, and has applied her approach in partnership with the City of San Francisco and institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Siembieda has served as an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz Genomics Institute—home of the Genome Browser—where her contributions were further advanced through UCSC’s Arts Research Open Lab. Her work has been presented internationally, from the 01SJ Biennial in Silicon Valley to the National Gallery in Copenhagen and the CYLAND International Festival.
Siembieda holds an MFA in Digital Media Art from San José State University’s CADRE Media Art Lab, with a focus on green technology and sustainable materials. She also plays a civic role in strengthening the creative economy and cultural engagement in Silicon Valley through her work with the City of San José. Her tenure as Chief Creative Officer of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) reflects sustained leadership at the convergence of art, science, and public impact. Defne Beyce is a queer Turkish / American / Panamanian artist and printmaker who immigrated to California as a child. She worked with livestock around the Colorado front range before turning her focus toward art. Defne has an animal science degree from Colorado State University, a post-bac in design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from California College of Art in San Francisco. She learned to screen-print from the cohort of radical Oaxacan printers at Mission Graffica in San Francisco. She has taught printmaking at Kala Art Institute, UC Berkeley, and the Palo Alto Art Center and managed the print studio and poster program at Facebook's Analog Lab. Defne currently prints out of her backyard studio in Redwood City, California, at the base of the San Francisco Bay. Elias Aveces is the founder and research director of the Plurinational Land Reform in CA Working Group. The group emerged in 2023 as a grassroots collective of students & researchers seeking to bridge the gap between (farm)working and professional classes. It takes inspiration from the tactical innovations plus lessons which indigenous-peasant movements based in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile have experimented with to advance what they have coined as "plurinationalism". Aveces holds a MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Elizabeth Estrada is a multidisciplinary artist working between painting, poetry, sculpture, performance, and installation, often intertwining these mediums to explore themes of spirituality and body politics, alongside the internal and external processes of decay and regrowth. She recently had a solo exhibition at Recology SF and has exhibited at SOMArts, Art Share LA, CCA PLAySPACE Gallery, among others. She has performed poetry at Beyond Baroque, Tamarack, 120710 Gallery, and Abrams Claghorn Gallery. Currently based in the Bay Area, she recently received a bachelor's degree in Art practice and Creative Writing from UC Berkeley. Born in Ohio and raised by her grandparents in a fishing town in southeastern China, Grace Jin descends from generations of village physicians whose lineage she continues as a medical student and artist working in painting, calligraphy, installation, bookmaking, and social practice. Her work emerges from the dual training of medicine and art—two disciplines that touch, diagnose, render, sanctify, regulate, and imagine bodies. Moving between clinic and ritual, Grace examines how diasporic femme bodies absorb, resist, and remember systems of care and control. Guided by Traditional Chinese Medicine as a living epistemology, Grace works with herbal dyes, medicinal ink, mineral pigments, joss paper, and pharmaceutical ephemera to create sensorial environments that illuminate the relational nature of healing. Her art is an imagined pharmacopeia that refuses purity, and instead braids science with spirituality, diasporic histories with anti-colonial futures. Kea Kahoilua Clebsch is artist from the island of Hawaiʻi. Her art practice is grounded in a love for her ancestors and ʻohana, who she gets to honor and know more deeply through her work. Primarily working in oil paint, Kea's art opens portals to her history, where she momentarily lives with and learns from the kānaka who precede her. Contrasting moments of clarity and dream-like haze, Kea moves in and out of touch with her subjects until land and body are indiscernible, emphasizing the ways kānaka, our histories, and our political movements are embedded in land. Her practice aims to carve space for her ʻohana's moʻolelo in visual canons, honoring the strength of her predecessors who each resist in their own right.
Kea is currently studying Art Practice at Stanford University with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is excited to return to her community and embrace a cross pollination of her two fields. Kelsey Chen (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford and a multidisciplinary artist. In her scholarly work, she studies speculative and science fiction grounded in scientific/technical traditions outside of a Western techno-science, focusing on _silkpunk_ and Taoist scientific imaginaries. In her art practice, she is dedicated to trying to picture the true form of things, particularly those which are typically occluded or diffused (hyperobjects), working across painting, sculpture, weaving, book-making, and performance. Kola Heyward-Rotimi is a writer and PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, researching virtuality and the influence it has on urban environments. Currently, Kola's work focuses on smart city projects, particularly how computer simulations and the narrativization of climate change factor into their construction. He aims to delineate how the roles of speculative fiction, scenario planning, speculative finance, and architecture converge to validate the development of multibillion-dollar projects.
Kola's fiction has been nominated for the Nommo Awards and the BSFA Awards, and can be found in Logic(s), Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and more. Recurrent themes across his fiction include climate change, the entanglement of magic and technology, and depictions of Black queerness that are critical of mainstream Afrofuturist tropes. Nibha Akireddy is a Bay Area-raised artist currently based in San Francisco. Her work is an exploration of settling into body. She creates multi-layered figurative oil paintings that merge personal narratives with speculative futures, cultural memory, and vernacular art forms to examine the body as a vessel for storytelling. In her work, she explores skin as its own medium. Her paintings focus on color in skin, particularly on the way brown skin holds and reflects light. She is interested in the way fat, muscle, wrinkles, scars, and tan lines hold stories as physical imprints upon the body. Her work and her perspective are deeply influenced by her life in the Bay Area and her connection to its various communities, cultural conversations, and histories. Noe Naranjo Arias is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the computer as speculative consciousness and emotional software. Working within the unstable architectures of the digital, they investigate the “third space” as a metaphysical topology where flesh and pixel collapse, and subjectivity is rendered fluid, recursive, and perpetually unresolved.
Currently based in San José, California, and pursuing a BFA in Digital Media Art at San José State University (expected Fall 2026), Arias traces how algorithms, image systems, and networked environments reconfigure identity, collectivity, and presence in a reality that is always rendering, never rendered. Rwaida Gharib is a PhD student in Environment and Resources at Stanford’s School of Sustainability. Her research focuses on the international policy frameworks shaping climate adaptation and mobility, with an emphasis on environmental justice for displaced communities, rural populations, and women and girls. She examines how global institutions respond to climate vulnerability—and how they can better support frontline communities.
Her current work spans climate displacement and adaptation efforts in the Global South, grounded in field research across East Africa and Central America. She examines how narrative structures, legal categorization, and language shape relationships with nature and influence how climate risks and resilience are interpreted within policy and institutional settings.
She brings over 15 years of experience in international development and humanitarian policy, including advisory roles with the World Bank Group, USAID, and UNDP, and an appointment in the Obama Administration, where she helped design the White House’ clean energy initiative, Power Africa. Currently, she supports adaptation finance research at Stanford's Sustainable Finance Institute as well as the Graduate School of Business’s Ecopreneurship Program. Amy Balkin is a San Francisco–based artist whose work focuses on how humans create, interact with, and impact the social and material landscapes they inhabit. Past projects include This is the Public Domain, an ongoing effort to create a permanent international commons from 2.64 acres of land located near Tehachapi, CA, via legal transfer to the global public. Other projects include Invisible-5 (2006), an environmental justice audio tour along the I-5 freeway corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles. She received an MFA in New Genres from Stanford University in 2003, and is a 2007 recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Recent exhibitions include Carbon 13 at the Ballroom Marfa, Required Reading at The Center for Book Arts, and Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Balkin was a featured artist at DOCUMENTA (13), presenting documentation from her ongoing project Public Smog. Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI, game engines, and documentary practices to probe and play with the artifice of knowledge. She also collaborates frequently with scientists and engineers, from synthetic biology to astrophysics, to explore the frontier between science and fiction, between imaging and imagining. She was an inaugural Steve Jobs Archive Fellow and the 6th VH Award Grand Prix recipient. Zoë Rehnborg is currently pursuing a double major in Biology and Art Practice at Stanford University in California. Informed by her experience in fungal ecology labs, she is particularly interested in the ecological and existential dimensions of decay, and the role of microorganisms and fungi as agents of transformation – both in natural systems and in human narratives. Through her interdisciplinary practice, she investigates how cycles of decomposition can reveal new ways of understanding identity, loss, and interconnectedness.
& More to be announced soon!
BEAM’s work has been supported by NASA, NOAA, MIT Media Lab, MIT Open Documentary Lab, SeaAhead VC, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and more.
With a background in technology design and innovation ethics from Stanford and RCA, she creates tactile experiences around AI, robotics, and media technology’s growing presence in our everyday and the subsequent anthropologic changes that follow. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou’s IRCAM, Dutch Design Week, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Ars Electronica.
Siembieda holds an MFA in Digital Media Art from San José State University’s CADRE Media Art Lab, with a focus on green technology and sustainable materials. She also plays a civic role in strengthening the creative economy and cultural engagement in Silicon Valley through her work with the City of San José. Her tenure as Chief Creative Officer of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) reflects sustained leadership at the convergence of art, science, and public impact.
Kea is currently studying Art Practice at Stanford University with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is excited to return to her community and embrace a cross pollination of her two fields.
Kola's fiction has been nominated for the Nommo Awards and the BSFA Awards, and can be found in Logic(s), Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and more. Recurrent themes across his fiction include climate change, the entanglement of magic and technology, and depictions of Black queerness that are critical of mainstream Afrofuturist tropes.
Currently based in San José, California, and pursuing a BFA in Digital Media Art at San José State University (expected Fall 2026), Arias traces how algorithms, image systems, and networked environments reconfigure identity, collectivity, and presence in a reality that is always rendering, never rendered.
Her current work spans climate displacement and adaptation efforts in the Global South, grounded in field research across East Africa and Central America. She examines how narrative structures, legal categorization, and language shape relationships with nature and influence how climate risks and resilience are interpreted within policy and institutional settings.
She brings over 15 years of experience in international development and humanitarian policy, including advisory roles with the World Bank Group, USAID, and UNDP, and an appointment in the Obama Administration, where she helped design the White House’ clean energy initiative, Power Africa. Currently, she supports adaptation finance research at Stanford's Sustainable Finance Institute as well as the Graduate School of Business’s Ecopreneurship Program.
Curatorial Team
| L. Song Wu is a figurative painter originally from Tampa, Florida, currently dividing her time between Northern California and Milan. Her paintings explore the tension between intimacy and alienation, challenging viewers to confront their own sense of belonging and constructions of place and femininity. Drawing on sources such as anime, YouTube thumbnails, and memory, Wu creates a meticulously crafted world that refracts her ideas of place and self in today’s dizzying contemporary landscape. Wu’s work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She has been selected as a finalist for the AXA Art Prize and the Tournesol Award |
Sid received a BA (Hons) in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with a Minor in Creative Writing (poetry). She is a recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts. She is a former member of the Chocolate Heads Movement Band. Her work has been presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, and Stanford University. Sid directs, designs, crafts, and sometimes thinks. She performs when needed.
Bhumikorn “Bhu” Kongtaveelert (b. 2003, Nakhonsawan, Thailand; based in Northern California; he/him) is an installation artist and researcher working with immersive, multi-channel moving-image installations projected onto “screen-sculptures”: soft, often translucent surfaces stretched across rigid frames. His practice explores collective memory embedded in water, natural hazards & global supply chains, primarily explored through oral history.
As a researcher, Kongtaveelert is a Long-term Investing Fellow with the Stanford Long-term Investing Initiative and California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS), where he researches geopolitics, natural disasters and infrastructure co-investment contracts.