BAMPFA Curators

Susan Oxtoby

Director of Film and Senior Film Curator

Since her appointment as Senior Film Curator in 2005, Susan Oxtoby has organized several major film series for BAMPFA, including retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Beavers, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Satyajit Ray, and Agnès Varda, among others. In 2014, Oxtoby co-curated Discovering Georgian Cinema, the largest retrospective of Georgian film ever mounted in North America. Prior to her arrival at BAMPFA, Oxtoby was director of programming at Cinematheque Ontario, the year-round public screening division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group (TIFFG). In 2005 and again in 2010, she was appointed to five-year terms on the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Library of Congress on films to be named to the National Registry. From 2001 to 2005, she served as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). Oxtoby has directed two independent films, All Flesh Is Grass (1988) and January 15, 1991: Gulf War Diary (1992). In 2015 she was honored with a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication for her help furthering the arts in France and throughout the world, and a Medal of Honor by the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

Stephanie Cannizzo

Associate Curator

Associate Curator, Stephanie Cannizzo, joined the museum staff in 1989. She has organized numerous BAMPFA exhibitions including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee; Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arms Reach; and Yoko Ono: Grapefruit. She assisted on many exhibitions including A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s; Louise Bourgeois: Drawings; In a Different Light; and Andrea Fraser: Aren’t they lovely?. She received her MA in Liberal Studies from Saint Mary’s College of California; and her BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Claire Frost

Curatorial Assistant

Curatorial Assistant Claire Frost has worked in the Bay Area since 2011 and has held positions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, ArtSpan, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Intersection for the Arts. She has presented her research at the College Art Association Annual Conference (2018, and 2021), and the Common Field Convening (2020). She received her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Her graduate studies focused on the intersection of identity and historiography in relation to second wave feminism and conceptual art. She is the founder and curator of the apartment galleries COLLABO in Chicago, and Claire Frost in San Francisco.

Kathy Geritz

Film Curator

Film Curator Kathy Geritz focuses on international documentary, avant-garde, and independent film. In 2010, with Steve Anker and Steve Seid, Geritz edited the major book Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000 and organized the companion film series, which toured nationally. Geritz was the 2015 International Curator in Residence at the new Len Lye Centre in New Zealand; in 2013 she gave special presentations at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival and the Ambulante Film Festival, and in 2012 she guest curated programs for the Ann Arbor Film Festival and The Brakhage Center Symposium. Geritz is a member of the Flaherty Film Seminar’s programming committee and teaches a course on film curating in the Department of Film and Media at UC Berkeley.

Kathryn MacKay

Associate Film Curator

Prior to coming to BAMPFA in 2016, MacKay served as the programmer and interim artistic director of The Images Festival in Toronto, one of North America’s largest festivals of alternative cinema and media art. MacKay’s programming activities have also included positions as guest curator at the Ryerson Image Centre; guest programmer for TIFF Cinematheque; programming associate for Wavelengths, Toronto International Film Festival; and curator of installations for The 8Fest. She cofounded Early Monthly Segments, a screening series that presents historical and contemporary experimental works, and has served as the chair of the Board of Directors of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT). Her wide-ranging areas of interest span historical and contemporary periods with an emphasis on independent film.

Elaine Y. Yau

Associate Curator

Elaine Y. Yau is associate curator of the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA, where she is organizing an exhibition from Eli Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts for fall 2024. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersection of discourses on folk art, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Adjunct Curators

Jacquelynn Baas

Guest curator Jacquelynn Baas served as BAMPFA’s director from 1988 to 1999 and as interim director from 2007 to 2008. She has organized over thirty exhibitions, including The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life (voted Best Show in a University Gallery by the International Association of Art Critics), and Berkeley Eye: Perspectives on the Collection (2016–17). She was founding director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In 2000 Baas cofounded the arts consortium Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness, which over the course of its five-year existence generated some fifty exhibitions, educational programs, artist residencies, and two books: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art and Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today.

Lucinda Barnes

Curator Emerita Lucinda Barnes joined the BAMPFA curatorial staff in 2001, and served as chief curator and director of programs and collections from 2004 to 2016. At BAMPFA Barnes has curated and co-curated more than forty exhibitions, including Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction (2019), Creation in Form and Color: Hans Hofmann (2016, for the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany), Rudolf de Crignis / MATRIX 245 (2013), Indeterminate Stillness: Looking at Whistler (2010), Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet (2009), and Measure of Time (2006). Barnes has also directed numerous major exhibitions that have traveled to Berkeley, such as Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage (2011), James Castle: A Retrospective (2010), and Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens (2005). Prior to BAMPFA, Barnes held senior curatorial posts at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art).

Sandra S. Phillips

Sandra S. Phillips is curator emerita of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She joined SFMOMA’s curatorial staff in 1987, and assumed the positions of senior curator in 1999 and curator emerita in 2017. She has organized numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions of modern and contemporary photography including Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870, Diane Arbus Revelations, Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, and Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence. Phillips was previously curator at the Vassar College Art Museum, and has taught at various institutions including the State University of New York, New Paltz; Parsons School of Design; San Francisco State University; and the San Francisco Art Institute. She was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome and received a grant from The Japan Foundation in 2000.

Philippe Pirotte

Philippe Pirotte (b.1972 in Antwerp/BE) is an art historian, critic, curator and from 2014 to March 2020 held the position of Rector of the Städelschule and Director of Portikus. From 2005–2011, Pirotte was the director of the Kunsthalle Bern and from 2003–2013 Senior Advisor of the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam. In 2012, he became Adjunct Senior Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive and in 1999 he co-founded objectif-exhibitions, a not-for-profit institution in Antwerp, Belgium.