Bruce Baillie (1931-2020) was an American experimental filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was the co-founder of Canyon Cinema and San Francisco Cinematheque and a guiding member of the New American Cinema.

Karen Holmes’s experimental films have exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. As a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, Holmes has nurtured the spirit of experimental filmmaking for over thirty years. She currently lives in Alameda, CA.

Tomonari Nishikawa was born in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture in 1969. He studied economics in Japan, but quickly became disenchanted, finding himself increasingly enthralled by European cinema, and the films of Shuji Terayama and Toshio Matsumoto. In 1999 he immigrated to the United States with the goal of becoming a filmmaker, and began studying cinema and philosophy at SUNY Binghamton in 2001 as a student of Ken Jacobs, Julie Murray, and Vincent Grenier. He later received his MFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute, studying under Ernie Gehr. Nishikawa has completed nearly 20 films since 2003, which have screened at film festivals and museums internationally. He lives between Japan and the USA, and currently teaches in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.      

Greta Snider has made films since discovering the art form at Antioch College in Ohio, and promptly moved to San Francisco to join a thriving low-budget experimental film scene, where she continues to make, screen, and teach about cinema. In her work, Snider utilizes a combination of original and archival material to create nonfiction art cinema of a personal nature. Her single screen films on 16mm lean heavily on the creative use of montage, interweaving the personal and historical in a number of short essay films. Her stereoscopic performances and installations take the materiality of film and family photos, to reshape themes of memory, loss, and personal histories in a more intimate, affective experience. She has screened in museums throughout the world, and also in bars, alleyways, and once, at an all-night international rave party in a penthouse in the Shibuya. Snider teaches experimental filmmaking at San Francisco State University, where she is faculty advisor to The Archive Project.

Scott Stark has produced more than 75 films and videos since 1980. Additionally, he has created a number of gallery and non-gallery installations using film and video, and elaborate photographic collages using large grids of images. Born and educated in the midwest, he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to build into the work elements of humor and incongruity that allow the viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance. Both a passionate purist and a cynical skeptic, he likes to emphasize the physicality of film while cross-referencing it to the world outside the theater, attempting to lay bare the paradoxes of modern culture and the magical nature of the perceptual experience. He currently lives in San Francisco.

Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.