Curator Picks

Moving between performance, creative direction, and interdisciplinary collaboration, Mia J. Chong is drawn to experiences that feel immersive, unexpected, and deeply tied to the creative energy of San Francisco. Her picks lean toward spaces where art, music, design, and community naturally overlap.

Born and raised in San Francisco, La Doña makes work rooted in music, memory, resistance, and cultural inheritance. Her picks honor the community spaces, independent venues, and neighborhood institutions that continue to sustain artists and audiences in a rapidly changing city.

Raised in the Bay Area, Ruby Ibarra has built a body of work that moves between hip-hop, spoken word, community organizing, and cultural storytelling. Her picks reflect the spaces that continue to nurture local artists, independent voices, and the feeling that live performance can still bring people together with purpose.

As the founder of Jessica Silverman Gallery, Jessica Silverman has helped shape San Francisco’s contemporary art conversation through artists, exhibitions, and collaborations that feel both rigorous and alive. Her picks move beyond gallery walls toward performances, gatherings, and spaces where creative communities naturally converge.

Perched somewhere between theater marquees, stadium lights, and the occasional excellent rooftop, Violet the Raven has become an unofficial observer of San Francisco nightlife and culture. Her picks favor the loud, the joyful, the slightly dramatic, and the kinds of places that keep the city’s feathers ruffled in the best possible way.

Through novels, journalism, publishing, and the creation of spaces for young writers, Dave Eggers has helped shape the literary and cultural identity of San Francisco for decades. His picks lean toward places with strong local character; venues where music, conversation, and collective experience still feel inseparable from the city itself.

For more than two decades, Zac Posen has been one of the defining names in American fashion, known for bringing glamour, craftsmanship, and old-school elegance into contemporary culture. Now leading creative direction at Gap Inc. and Old Navy, his San Francisco picks lean toward places with atmosphere, personality, and a strong sense of occasion.

If you’ve gone out in San Francisco anytime in the last few years, chances are Anthony Presents had something to do with it. Through AP Group and RNB Social Club, the San Francisco native has built a following around live music, good crowds, and venues that still know how to make a night feel like an event.

Some people throw parties. D’Arcy Drollinger spent years building an entire parallel San Francisco around them. Actor, director, producer, choreographer, impresario — one of those people who understands that nightlife, at its best, is part theater, part church, part organized misbehavior.