San Francisco History Days 2020

Authors + Artists

Here, you’ll find a full list of all participating authors and artists. Clicking on individual participants takes you to their spotlight page with featured works as well as event listings and registration information.

Find the full lineup of events for September 25-27, 2020 on our 2020 Programs page and be sure to visit our Participants page as well to see the rest of our exhibitors, speakers, sponsors, and tour guides.

Patricia Araujo

Artist exhibiting Facades: Mid Market Landmarks

Since the late 1990’s, Patricia Araujo has painted the facades of both iconic city landmarks and downtown buildings. Her paintings depict praiseworthy examples of San Francisco architecture, some utilitarian and others grandly ornamental. She’s been bewildered by the architecture of cities she’s lived and traveled to and by imaginary places.. Araujo continues to deepen her conceptual themes on architecture, place and change in the urban landscape.

Robert Barde + Pat Cunneen

Co-authors of South End: Sport and Community at the Dock of the Bay

Bob Bardeis the retired Deputy Director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also Executive Director of the Experimental Social Science Laboratory (aka Xlab). He has written on immigration and public health for a number of scholarly journals and even has a little piece on maritime history for Sea History.

Pat Cunneen has been a member of the South End Rowing Club for over fifty years. He was born and raised in San Francisco and was a firefighter in Daly City. Pat is also an engraver and an accomplished artist. He now lives in Santa Rosa, and has been the South End’s de facto historian since the invention of movable type.

Paul Bignardi

Author of A Fleet History of the San Francisco Municipal Railway.

Paul Bignardi was born in San Francisco and grew up in South San Francisco, San Bruno and Daly City. He spent a lot of time in The City while growing up, including riding all types of Muni transit vehicles. He graduated from S.F State University with BA degrees in Political Science and History, an MPA, and with a JD from UC-Hastings Law. He has worked for over 24 years in Transit Planning at AC Transit, the National Park Service, and 14 years at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA – current parent agency of Muni). He has also worked for six years as a driver at Hornblower Classic Cable Cars (previously Classic Cable Car Charters).

Matthew Booker

Author of Down by the Bay: San Francisco’s History Between the Tides

Born in Berkeley, Matthew Booker was raised in rural western Sonoma County. He taught environmental history at North Carolina State University for sixteen years, before joining the National Humanities Center in July 2020 as its Vice President for Scholarly Programs. His book, Down by the Bay: San Francisco’s History Between the Tides (Berkeley: University of California Press, paperback, June 2020) is the first environmental history of San Francisco Bay. It treats the area as both a natural and a human space; as both estuary and city.

Rachel Brahinsky + Alexander Tarr

Co-authors of A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

Rachel Brahinsky is Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco, affiliated with Urban and Public Affairs, Politics, and Urban Studies. Her research is focused on race, property, and urban change. Alexander Tarr is Assistant Professor of Geography at Worcester State University. His research, writing, and cartography examine the development of cities, food politics, and digital culture.

Chris Carlsson

Author of Hidden San Francisco

Chris Carlsson, is a writer, San Francisco historian, “professor,” bicyclist, tour guide, blogger, photographer, book and magazine designer. He’s lived in San Francisco since 1978 and has been self-employed in various capacities since the early 1980s.

Frank Dunnigan

Author of Classic San Francisco: From Ocean Beach to Mission Bay

Frank Dunnigan was born in San Francisco during the baby boom years of the 1950s to a family that first settled there in 1860. He is the author of other local history books, and also wrote a monthly history column, STREETWISE, published by Western Neighborhoods Project for ten years beginning in 2009. He also has contributed narrative and photos of various projects by other authors.

Dale Fehringer

Author of San Francisco: Legends, Heroes and Heartthrobs

Dale Fehringer is a Noe Valley resident and a 40-year resident of San Francisco. San Francisco history is a passion; writing is a second career. He is the author of San Francisco: Legends, Heroes and Heartthrobs.

Peter M. Field

Author of The Tenderloin District of San Francisco Through Time

Peter Field has lived in San Francisco since 1970, where he was a longtime homeless psychiatric case manager in the Tenderloin, as well as in other areas. He’s led walking history tours of the neighborhood for City Guides since 2006, and is the author of several articles and a book about the Tenderloin’s history.

Anne Evers Hitz

Author of Lost Department Stores of San Francisco: Six Bygone Stores That Defined an Era

Proud to be a fifth-generation San Franciscan, author Anne Evers Hitz has had a long interest in San Francisco history, its lore, and legends. Anne is the author of Emporium Department Store (Arcadia, 2014) San Francisco’s Ferry Building (Arcadia, 2017), and Lost Department Stores of San Francisco: Six Bygone Stores That Defined an Era (History Press, 2020). She is a volunteer guide at the Ferry Building for City Guides, a group of local volunteers who give free walking tours of San Francisco.

Lincoln Mitchell

Author of San Francisco Year Zero

Lincoln Mitchell is a writer and professor who grew up in San Francisco and now lives in New York City where he teaches in the political science department at Columbia University. San Francisco Year Zero is his sixth book. Lincoln writes primarily on American politics and foreign policy, baseball and San Francisco, but rarely in the same piece. He has been widely published in American and European journals, newspapers and other media. Lincoln has been a Giants fan since the mid-1970s.

November Fire

Creator of the forthcoming film Barbary Coast and San Francisco Cable Cars

Bay Area company November Fire produces documentaries that cover the history of San Francisco’s transit, lost amusement areas, and legendarily raucous corridors.

Elizabeth Pepin Silva + Lewis Watts

Co-authors of Harlem West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era

Elizabeth Pepin Silva is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and former day manager of the historic Fillmore Auditorium. She holds a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University.

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist, and professor emeritus of art at UC Santa Cruz with a longstanding interest in the cultural landscape of the African diaspora in the Bay Area and internationally.

Amy Trueblood

Author of Across a Broken Shore

Amy Trueblood grew up in Southern California only ten minutes from Disneyland which sparked an early interest in storytelling. Her debut, Nothing But Sky was a Spring 2018 Junior Library Guild selection. Her second novel, Across a Broken Shore, also a JLG selection, was recently selected by ALA as a 2020 Best Feminist Book in Children’s Literature and won the Gold Medal for Historical Fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards.