Meet Some Staff Artists

Liz Keim initiated the Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts Program and film collection in 1982 and has since worked to integrate the visions of independent media artists into museum programming, public exhibition, and education. Under her direction, the Cinema Arts Program has expanded to include outdoor screenings, filmmaker residencies, installations, and workshops. She guest lectures, has served on many local film juries, participates in symposiums nationwide, and has curated cinema programs internationally. Liz studied with Edith Kramer, former director of the Pacific Film Archive, and Robert Frank, the noted photographer and cinematographer. She is published in Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theaters, a collection of literary essays on the city’s thriving cinema culture. On occasion Liz co-teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of San Francisco and lectures at various campuses around the San Francisco Bay Area. Her film In the Red (co-directed by Karen Merchant) has screened internationally.

Shawn Lani is a senior artist and curator of the Exploratorium’s Outdoor Gallery and other outdoor works. His Outdoor team created site-specific installations and commissionied a wide range of artists to help enrich and enliven the museum’s new home at Pier 15. In addition to their work at the piers, the Outdoor team is actively developing and installing public works throughout the Bay Area. As principal investigator for the NSF-funded project Ciencia Publica, Shawn led the development of portable and public interactions in predominantly Latino neighborhoods, working in partnership with San Francisco city planners and advocates for urban improvements. Shawn has also created pieces for the NSF-funded Outdoor Exploratorium: Experiments in Noticing. The project team installed twenty outdoor pieces at Fort Mason, a unique urban national park in San Francisco. In addition, as a member of the NOAA/Exploratorium Vision Council, Shawn advocates for artworks that create intimate experiences with broad implications. An active public artist, Shawn has participated in several national and international artist-in-residencies. His creations are installed in more than fifty museums worldwide, and he is the recipient of a National American Institute of Architects award for the monumental LIGO Wind Wall installation in Livingston, Louisiana.

Amy Snyder creates, curates, and edits imagery that strongly communicates to a wide and diverse audience. She works in collaboration with scientists, artists, educators, designers, and other media producers. Amy was the lead photographer, often shaping the visual narrative, for award-winning Exploratorium websites including Driven: True Stories of Inspiration; Never Lost: Polynesian Navigation; Science of Gardening; and Science of Music. She curated the first-ever Photography After Dark event, which featured over 25 presenters, for the Exploratorium’s popular After Dark evening series. She coauthored Sustain, Build, and Under, three books that focus on the process of building the Exploratorium’s new home. Her award-winning work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Sunset magazine, Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many educational textbooks.

Susan Schwartzenberg is a senior artist at the Exploratorium, where she leads the development of the Fisher Bay Observatory Gallery. She has been a curator, photographer, designer, and artist, and served as director of media for the museum. She has participated in many exhibit development and Web-based projects. Susan was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of Art, and Stanford University. As a photographer and visual artist, she has received numerous awards, and has taken part in residencies and exhibitions worldwide. She is known for her public art, including recent works at Stanford University and San Francisco’s McLaren Park.

Samuel Sharkland works in the Cinema Arts Program with Liz Keim, its founder and director. With her collaboration and guidance, Sam curates a variety of programs for the museum both inside the Kanbar Forum as well as outside of traditional cinematic contexts on the museum floor and outdoors. His interest in film extends to its potential to engage audiences in thought, participation, and discussion. The sound and image may act as catalysts to other worlds or deeper investigations of our own. Sam’s passion extends outside of the Exploratorium’s walls to understanding and enacting the power of visual language and storytelling with audiences.

As senior videographer in the Moving Images department since 2011, Phoebe has produced and directed videos for a myriad of exhibition platforms at the Exploratorium including the awarding-winning web series “Science in the City.” Her personal films have screened all over the world, including at the Academy of Motion Pictures, the Pacific Film Archive, the Telluride Film Festival, Slamdance, International Documentary Association’s Documentary Showcase, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. One of Phoebe’s recent films, “Circles of Confusion,” received a Student Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and received a Golden Gate Award from the San Francisco Film Society. She also teaches filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University. She received her MFA in Film Production at San Francisco State University in 2008.

Denise has been an exhibit developer at the Exploratorium since 2001. A keen observer of the natural world, she has studied subjects ranging from botany and ecology to marine biology, microbiology, and evolution. She has developed many biology exhibits at the Exploratorium including Glass Settling Plate, Mosquito Magnet, Leaves That Never Get Wet, and Algae Chandelier, and has redesigned some old favorites such as Chick Embryo and Mimosa House. She has also produced exhibits such as All Eyes on Me and Mood Lighting, which highlight her ability to design exhibits that don't have wet and squishy things in them. Before setting anchor at the Exploratorium, Denise worked as a field biologist and a lecturer at SF State, and she once got to shoot on location with English broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough in the Mohave Desert. 

Watch an interview with Denise.

An artist and exhibit developer, Charles has been making thought-provoking, beautiful, and sometimes whimsical experiences for Exploratorium visitors since 1998. His work presents actual physical phenomena—often of striking visual beauty—that draw people into a careful noticing and interaction. He seeks to provoke a sense of delight and wonder and reward extended observation. Frequently this involves developing an apparatus to recreate or highlight some natural phenomenon. Charles frequently collaborates with scientists to recreate lab experiments. Through these collaborations, he has discovered a strong correlation between his process and that of the scientific experimentalist. Both build apparatuses—scientists to probe the limits of their collective understanding and Charles to probe the boundaries of beauty, delight, and wonder.

Wayne’s focus is on composing for small ensembles, making field recordings, designing multimedia works, and developing a generative compositional language that explores temporal extremes. He is the curator for Resonance, an Exploratorium music series, and creates sound installations and composes sound tracks and other pieces for the museum for events including After Dark, exhibits, the Science in the City webcast series, and more. He created a live audio rendering of the 2012 annular eclipse using camera feed, and a live sonification of the 2011 Transit of Venus and 2016 Total Solar Eclipse in Micronesia using live telescope feed. He has also created ringtones using Exploratorium exhibits and ephemera, and has made recordings of unusual instruments. Wayne has performed and collaborated with musicians in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Indonesia.