Careers in the Arts Panel

Velina Brown is a singer, director, actor, teacher, and columnist. For over twenty years, Brown has been a principal actor in the Tony award-winning Francisco Mime Troupe helping create the company’s celebrated brand of politically satirical plays and performing on stages nationally and internationally. She is also a veteran of the American Conservatory Theater, the Eureka Theater, Theatreworks, The Willows, Thick Description, and the Oregon Cabaret Theater. As a director, she specializes in new work, with past productions at the African-American Shakespeare Company and the Lilith Theatre Company. An accomplished singer and songwriter, Brown received a vocal scholarship to San Francisco State University, and performs regularly throughout the Bay Area. She developed a career and life coaching service, The Business of Show Biz, and has a monthly column in Theater Bay Area Magazine.

Lisa Inoue is a user experience designer and graphic designer with a degree in media studies from UC Berkeley. Currently, she is a user experience designer on the Innovation Team at Visa, which entails doing user research, storyboarding, leading design workshops, and creating visual designs. On the side, Inoue enjoys lettering and illustration projects, creating zines, and teaching graphic design. She previously held design positions at imagiCal advertising and Innovative Design and had several design internships in various industries such as finance and real estate. Inoue also attended design and art workshops and programs at art schools throughout high school. She is passionate about mental health awareness, education, and languages. 

Zac T. Rose is a freelance writer and currently the manager of communications at the Asian Art Museum. Born and raised in San Francisco, Rose studied English Literature, Architectural History, and French at Columbia University. While in New York, he worked in the art library, freelanced for local guide books, and interned at People for the American Way. After graduating, Rose drafted articles and book chapters for a public policy non-profit, did political fundraising, and dipped his toes into fashion PR before realizing that he still had an academic itch to scratch. Pursuing his masters in the UK and as a Fulbright scholar at the Royal Library in Brussels, Belgium—all while continuing to write freelance—gave him an appropriately nerdy perspective on cultural organizations that he brought back to New York. There, he worked for years as a strategic communications consultant in museum audience development, before stoking the scholarly flames once more and finally finishing up his Cambridge doctoral dissertation in art history and landing his dream job at the Asian Art Museum in 2016.

Laura Moeller is an art conservator with over 10 years working for some of the largest museum and private conservation labs in the country. Moeller is the Assistant Registrar in the exhibitions department at The Contemporary Jewish Museum and the owner of Strange Stock, a studio in Oakland specializing in the repair and preservation of works on paper and photographic materials. Laura is an alumna of the Museum Studies Graduate School at George Washington University and holds additional degrees in photography and chemistry. She is passionate about working with more obscure collection items and ignored historical artifacts, specifically focusing on outsider and lowbrow art. Some of her favorite career treatments include work on the 4 million object photography archives for Ebony and JET magazines, 19th century spiritual books damaged during Hurricane Katrina, Albert Einstein's personal papers, and the handwritten document outlining the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution.

Amy M. Ho is a visual artist who builds video and spatial installations that bring attention to our existence as both physical and psychological beings. She received her undergraduate degree in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and her Masters in Fine Arts from Mills College. Ho has received individual grants from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the San Francisco Arts Commission, and was selected for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Bay Area Now 7. She’s had numerous fellowships and residencies in the Bay Area including at the Kala Art Institute, the Lucid Art Foundation, and Project 387, and internationally in Japan and the Czech Republic. Ho is currently the studio director at Real Time and Space and an instructor at San Francisco Art Institute. Additionally, as a teacher at San Quentin State Prison, she is working on a series of installations developed collaboratively with the inmates based on their memories of their lives before prison. Ho's work has been exhibited extensively locally and internationally and she is represented by Chandra Cerrito Contemporary.