My career in arts management began in 1982 at a small photo gallery in San Francisco.

I joined the Eye Photography Gallery - a heady collective of social documentary and rock music photographers - soon after moving to San Francisco from Oregon. Blue Sky Gallery in Portland had become a model organization for me, and Eye Gallery fit the bill as a place to learn and network. Over the next five years I helped the gallery transition from a collective to a registered non-profit, and to move to a central downtown location. Not ready to commit to a full-time position, I left Eye in 1988 to travel in Europe.

Left: Eye Gallery, 758 Valencia St., San Francisco, ca. 1985

I joined San Francisco Camerawork as Assistant Director to Marnie Gillett (pictured right) in 1989. Camerawork was then the most prominent non-profit photo organization in San Francisco, and Marnie became a valued mentor and close friend. Thanks to her and other colleagues there, my time at Camerawork was an incredibly productive learning experience. I helped organize two "Feminism, Activism, and Art" conferences that took place in the early 1990s at the height of that era’s culture wars. My immersion in postmodern and feminist pratice introduced me to some of the world's foremost photographers and writers, among them Nan Goldin, Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Willis, Joel Peter Witkin, David Levi Strauss, Rebecca Solnit, Larry Sultan, and numerous others.

I left Camerawork in December 2004 to work full-time as exhibition consultant and contributing editor on Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, a 50-year commemoration project that resurrected the archive of a Japanese army photographer sent to Nagasaki the day of the atomic attack on that city, August 9, 1945. 

After Nagasaki Journey opened in August 1995 I returned to gallery management as director of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.  As SFACG's director and head curator from 1995-2005, I oversaw four municipal exhibition sites in the Civic Center – a contemporary gallery in the Veterans Building, community galleries in City Hall, an adjacent storefront space for video and sculpture, and an open lot for environmental installations. As director I strove to represent the broadest possible interpretation of San Francisco's "community"; consequently we represented skateboarders and Burning Man artists, dozens of ethnic communities, same sex married couples, the sight-impaired, and literally hundreds of artists representing all genres of art making.

SFACG presented me with a fantastic opportunity to sample San Francisco's amazingly diverse creative and academic communities. It was a difficult decision to make, but after 25 years in the city I enrolled in an MBA program at the University of Denver, and moved to Colorado. Follow that thread on the "Denver" page.