100 Notable alumni of San Francisco Art Institute

Susan Kelk Cervantes is an American artist. She is a leading member of the San Francisco mural movement and the co-founder and executive director of the community-based non-profit, Precita Eyes Muralists.

George Albert Harris, also known as George Harris, was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, and educator. He was a participant in the WPA Federal Art Project and was among the youngest artists on the mural project at Coit Tower. Harris' style is California Modernism, often working in abstraction, focusing primarily on still lifes and portraits.

Janis Crystal Lipzin, is an American artist and educator, working with film, photography, video, audio, multi-media installations, and media performance. Lipzin is known for her work in many media and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for over three decades. Lipzin's films offer a unique blend of rigorous conceptual structure, formal investigation, and sensual discovery. The Bladderwort Document is...

Perham Wilhelm Nahl was an American printmaker, painter, illustrator and an arts educator active in Northern California.

Lynn Marie Kirby is an American visual artist, filmmaker and teacher. She lives in San Francisco, and is professor emerita at the California College of the Arts (CCA).

Mary DeNeale Morgan also known as M. DeNeale Morgan, was an American plein air painter, especially in watercolor, and printmaker. She was the director the Carmel Summer School of Art sponsored by the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club and a founding member of the Carmel Art Association (CAA) in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.

Lucy Hanna is an American artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California.

Janet Delaney is an American photographer and educator based in Berkeley, California. Her books include South of Market (2013), Public Matters (2018), and Red Eye to New York (2021), all published by MACK, and Too Many Products Too Much Pressure (2025) published by Deadbeat Club.

Tullio Francesco DeSantis, also known as Tullio, is an American contemporary artist, writer, technologist, and teacher. His work is informed by ancient and contemporary philosophy, science, and the relationship between art and life.

Allan Amato is an American portrait photographer, author, and film director.

Louise Janin was an American painter who settled in Paris in 1923. Her work relates to symbolism and musicalism (the attempt to interpret music in painting).

Emil Janel was a Swedish-born, American artist. A still life painter, he is mainly known for his caricatures in the Scandinavian flat-plane style of woodcarving, and is considered by many to be one of the best of this genre.

Mary Evelyn McCormick was an American painter.

Taravat Talepasand is an Iranian-American visual artist, activist, and educator. She is known for her interdisciplinary painting practice including drawing, sculpture and installation. As an Iranian-American woman, Talepasand explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority. Her approach to representation and figuration reflects the cross-pollination, or lack thereof, in our Western Society. Talepasand previously held the title...

Bill Martin was a realist and visionary artist. "Bill Martin's images possess an inexplicable compelling power," wrote Walter Hopps, the Smithsonian Institution's Curator of the 20th Century American Art Collection.

Bryan Davis is an American inventor and distiller. He is most noteworthy for inventing and patenting the first process documented to successfully replicate some of the effects of barrel ageing of distilled spirits in a laboratory (the Davis method). He is the founder of Lost Spirits an award-winning distilled spirits manufacturing company which uses the technology to manufacture its products...

René Yañez was a Mexican-American painter, assemblage artist, performance artist, curator and community activist located in San Francisco, California. He was a well-known contributor to the arts of San Francisco and is a co-founder of Galería de la Raza, a non-profit community focused gallery that features Latino and Chicano artists and their allies. In the early 1970s, he was one...

Hassel Smith was an American artist and teacher. He is considered to have been one of the USA's foremost West Coast artists, emerging in the decade after World War II as an innovative, potent, witty and often challenging exponent of Abstract Expressionism. He was a "generous and gregarious" teacher of great influence at the California School of Fine Arts in...

Megan Wilson is an American visual artist, writer, and activist based in San Francisco. Known for her large-scale installations, public projects, and street art, she incorporates a broad range of pop culture methodologies and aesthetics to address conceptual interests that include home, homelessness, social and economic justice, anti-capitalism, impermanence and generosity. Wilson's art practice is influenced by Buddhism and Vipassanā...

Daniela Franco is a French-Mexican conceptual artist and writer of Syrian origin who lives and works in Paris. Her body of work is interdisciplinary and explores intersections between experimental writing, pop music and visual art through the creation of archives, temporary fictions and video. She is a San Francisco Art Institute and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts alumna as well...

Richard Sexton is an American photographer, author, teacher, and architectural critic with a studio based in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is best known for his architectural photography publications and exhibitions, which have been shown internationally. Sexton was born in 1954 in Atlanta, Georgia, and currently resides in both New Orleans, Louisiana, and Walton County, Florida.

Mabel Dwight was an American artist whose lithographs showed scenes of ordinary life with humor and tolerance. Carl Zigrosser, who had studied it carefully, wrote that "Her work is imbued with pity and compassion, a sense of irony, and the understanding that comes of deep experience." Between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, she achieved both popularity and critical...

Kathy Goodell, is an American contemporary artist and educator, who works in sculptural objects, installation, drawing, and photography. She is a professor of painting and drawing at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Ala Ebtekar is an American contemporary visual artist, of Iranian descent. He is known for his work in painting, drawing, illumination, and installation. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe, and time, gazing back at us.

Rinaldo Cuneo, was an American artist known for his landscape paintings and murals. He was dubbed "the Painter of San Francisco".

Ruth Marie Reeves was an American painter, Art Deco textile designer and expert on Indian handicrafts.

Alice Brown Chittenden was an American painter based in San Francisco, California who specialized in flowers, portraits, and landscapes. Her life's work was a collection of botanicals depicting California wildflowers, for which she is renowned and received gold and silver medals at expositions. She taught at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1897...

Adolph Treidler was an American artist known for his illustrations, posters, commercial art, and wartime propaganda posters. His magazine covers and advertisement work appeared in McClure's, Harper's, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Century, Scribner's, and the Woman's Home Companion. He created ads for the Pierce Arrow automobile and for the French Line. His 1930s advertising work for the Bermuda Board...

Stephanie Syjuco, is a Filipino-born American conceptual artist and educator. She works in photography, sculpture, and installation art. Born in the Philippines, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. She lives in Oakland, California, and teaches art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Peter Reginato, is an American abstract sculptor and painter.

Herman George Scheffauer was a German-American poet, architect, writer, dramatist, journalist, and translator.

Yun Gee was a Chinese American modernist artist of the School of Paris. He lived and painted in San Francisco, Paris, and New York City, and was considered one of the most daring avant-garde painters during his time.

Addie Lucia Ballou was an American suffragist, poet, artist, author, and lecturer.

Steve Lambert is an American artist who works with issues of advertising and the use of public space. He is a founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, an artist-run initiative which critiques advertising through artistic interventions, and of the Budget Gallery (with Cynthia Burgess) which creates exhibitions by painting over outdoor advertisements and hanging submitted art in its place. Lambert's artistic...

Edgar Honetschläger is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, environmental activist and is the co-creator of Chickens Suit, a clothing range for chickens.

James Guilford Swinnerton was an American cartoonist and a landscape painter of the Southwest deserts. He was known as Jimmy to some and Swinny to others. He signed some of his early cartoons Swin, and on one ephemeral comic strip he used Guilford as his signature. Experimenting with narrative continuity, he played a key role in developing the comic strip...

Marc Horowitz is an American artist who works in a large variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance and video.

Nao Bustamante is a Chicana interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from the San Joaquin Valley in California. Her artistic practice encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation, and video and explores issues of ethnicity, class, gender, performativity, and the body. She is a recipient of the 2023 Rome Prize.

Ralph Ward Stackpole was an American sculptor, painter, muralist, etcher and art educator, San Francisco's leading artist during the 1920s and 1930s. Stackpole was involved in the art and causes of social realism, especially during the Great Depression, when he was part of the Public Works of Art Project, Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, and the Treasury...

Enrique Chagoya is a Mexican-born American painter, printmaker, and educator. The subject of his artwork is the changing nature of culture. He frequently uses shocking imagery, irony, and Mesoamerican icons to convey his point in his artwork. Chagoya teaches at Stanford University in the department of Art and Art History. He lives in San Francisco.

Mona Kuhn is a Brazilian-born American contemporary photographer best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form and essence. An underlying current in Kuhn's work is her reflection on our longing for spiritual connection and solidarity. As a result, her approach is unusual in that she develops close relationships with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable intimacy. Kuhn's...

Grace Carpenter Hudson was an American painter based in Northern California. She was nationally known during her lifetime for a numbered series of more than 684 portraits of the local Pomo natives. She painted the first, National Thorn, after her marriage in 1891. Her last work was completed in 1935.

Anne-Marie O'Connor is an American journalist and writer who authored The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. This bestselling story is about the eight-year legal battle by Vienna emigre Maria Altmann, represented by Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, to reclaim five Gustav Klimt paintings from her native Austria. This saga that...

Robert Ingersoll Aitken was an American sculptor. Perhaps his most famous work is the West Pediment of the United States Supreme Court Building.

Uri Katzenstein was an Israeli visual artist, sculptor, musician, builder of musical instruments and sound machines, and film maker.

Jeremy Dan Fish is an American illustrator and artist. He lives and works in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.

William Thomas Wiley was an American artist. His work spanned a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as funk art.

Sargent Claude Johnson was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation. He was known for Abstract Figurative and Early Modern styles. He was a painter, potter, ceramicist, printmaker, graphic artist, sculptor, and carver. He worked in a variety of media, including ceramics, clay, stone, wood, terra cotta, tiled murals, watercolor, oil on canvas,...

Xavier Timoteo Martínez was a Mexican-born American artist active in California the late 19th and early 20th century. He was a well-known bohemian figure in San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Monterey Peninsula and one of the co-founders of two California artists' organizations and an art gallery. He painted in a tonalist style and also produced monotypes, etchings, and...

Kevin Larmee is an American painter, best known for his association with the East Village art movement in New York City in the 1980s.

Emmy Lou Packard, also known as Betty Lou Packard, was an American visual artist and social activist in San Francisco, California. She was known for her paintings, printmaking, and murals, which were often political.

Liza Lou is an American visual artist. She is best known for producing large scale sculpture using glass beads. Lou ran a studio in Durban, South Africa from 2005 to 2014. She currently has a nomadic practice, working mostly outdoors in the Mojave Desert in southern California. Lou's work is grounded in domestic craft and intersects with the larger social...

Barbara Ethel Stauffacher Solomon was an American landscape architect and graphic designer. She was best known for her large-scale interior supergraphics and the exterior signs at Sea Ranch, a private estate with a Utopian vision in Sonoma County, California.

Rigo 23 is a Portuguese-born visual artist. He is known in the San Francisco community for having painted a number of large, graphic "sign" murals including: One Tree next to the U.S. Route 101 on-ramp at 10th and Bryant Street, Innercity Home on a large public housing structure, Sky/Ground on a tall abandoned building at 3rd and Mission Street, and...

Dame Darcy Pleasant, better known by the pen name Dame Darcy, is an American alternative cartoonist, fine artist, musician, cabaret performer, and animator/filmmaker. Her "Neo-Victorian" comic book series Meat Cake was published by Fantagraphics Books from 1993 to 2008. The Meat Cake Bible compilation was released in June 2016 and nominated for an Eisner Award in July 2017. Vegan Love:...

Mark Pauline is an American performance artist, new media artist, and machine inventor. He is known as founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories.

Jesse Hernandez is an American tattoo artist and graphic designer for video games and collectible toys. He was a part of the urban vinyl art movement of the 2010s. He was also the lead character and prop designer on United Front Games' ModNation Racers. His designs have been featured on Kidrobot's Dunny toys, including one owned by singer-songwriter Usher.

Lourdes Portillo was a Mexican film director, producer, and writer. The political perspectives of Portillo's films have been described as "nuanced" and versed with a point of view balanced by her experience as a lesbian and Chicana woman. Portillo films have been widely studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies.

Guy Orlando Rose was an American Impressionist painter and California resident, who received national recognition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Daniel Turner is an American artist based in New York City. His media include sculpture, photography, video and drawing.

Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she...

Natalia Leite is a Brazilian writer and director. She is best known for directing the indie hit film M.F.A., a feminist rape-revenge thriller that spurred debates at the start of the #MeToo movement. Subsequently, she went on to direct episodes of The Handmaid's Tale. Her work has been described as having “a bracing, assertive style”, "emotional intelligence" (Los Angeles Times),...

Jenny Odell is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, California. She taught Internet art and digital/physical design at Stanford University from 2013 to 2021. She wrote The New York Times best-selling book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019).

Ralph Gibson is an American art photographer best known for his photographic books. His images often incorporate fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition.

Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was an American architect and designer. She was one of the very few female American architects in her day. She was the designer of many landmark buildings and spaces for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad, notably in Grand Canyon National Park. Her work had enormous influence as she helped to create a...

Hernán Jiménez is a Costa Rican film director, screenwriter, actor and stand-up comedian.

Luis Mandoki is a Mexican film director, working in Mexico and Hollywood.

Barry McGee is an American artist. He is known for graffiti art, and a pioneer of the Mission School art movement. McGee is known by his monikers: Twist, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin.

Elizabeth Falkner is an American chef and restaurateur. She has appeared as a competitor and a judge on reality television cooking competitions, and she is a Top Chef television series alum.

Karen Finley is an American performance artist, musician, poet, and educator. The case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998), argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, was decided against Finley and the other artists. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of...

Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his naturalistic paintings of Black subjects that reference the work of Old Master paintings. In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former U.S. President Barack Obama's portrait for the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition...

Emily Carr was a Canadian artist who was inspired by the monumental art and villages of the First Nations and the landscapes of British Columbia. She also was a vivid writer and chronicler of life in her surroundings, praised for her "complete candour" and "strong prose". Klee Wyck, her first book, published in 1941, won the Governor General's Literary Award...

John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was an American sculptor best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. He is also associated with various other public works of art across the U.S., including Stone Mountain in Georgia, statues of Union General Philip Sheridan in Washington, D.C., and in Chicago, as well as a bust of Abraham Lincoln exhibited in the...

Don Ed Hardy is an American tattoo artist known for his tattoos, strong influence on the development of modern tattoo styles, and his eponymous brand.

Anna-Lou Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer best known for her portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken five hours before Lennon's murder, is considered one of Rolling Stone magazine's most famous cover photographs. The Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend, and...

Devendra Obi Banhart is an American singer-songwriter and visual artist. He was born in Texas and grew up in Venezuela and California. In 2000, he dropped out of the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco to pursue a musical career. In 2002, Banhart released his debut album and he is best known for his albums in the late 2000s...

Adam Spiegel, known professionally as Spike Jonze, is an American filmmaker, actor, musician, and photographer. His work includes films, commercials, music videos, skateboard videos and television.

Jerome John Garcia was an American musician who was the lead guitarist and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, which he co-founded and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader of the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall...

Lewis "Duke" Baltz was an American visual artist, photographer, and educator. He was an important figure in the New topographics movement of the late 1970s and was one of the photographers featured in the seminal New Topographics exhibition at the Eastman House. His best known work was monochrome photography of suburban landscapes and industrial parks which highlighted his commentary of...

Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working...

Sharon Lockhart is an American artist whose work considers social subjects primarily through motion film and still photography, often engaging with communities to create work as part of long-term projects. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1993. She has been a Radcliffe fellow, a...

Matthew Russell Rolston is an American artist, photographer, director and creative director, known for his lighting techniques and detailed approach to art direction and design. Rolston has been identified throughout his career with the revival and modern expression of Hollywood glamour.

Chrisann Brennan is an American memoirist and painter. She is the author of The Bite in the Apple, an autobiography about her relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They had one child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

Gale Morgan Harold III is an American actor, known for his leading and recurring roles on Queer as Folk, Deadwood, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, The Secret Circle and Defiance. He also starred in the romantic comedy Falling for Grace.

Edward McKnight Kauffer was an American artist and graphic designer who lived for much of his life in the United Kingdom. He worked mainly in poster art, but was also active as a painter, book illustrator and theatre designer.

Sarah "Sally" Cruikshank is an American cartoonist, animator and artist, whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program Sesame Street, and whose short Quasi at the Quackadero (1975) was inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction (related to Postminimalism, Color Field painting, and Abstract expressionism), and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.

James Stanley Brakhage was an American experimental filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.

Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Her accolades include two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award.

Renata Bernal (born February 3, 1937, in Munich, Germany is a contemporary American artist. Her work spans a broad range of media including oil paintings, acrylic paintings, pastel paintings, lithograph, woodcuts, and ink drawings. She has exhibited in New York City, San Francisco, Providence, Rhode Island, and in numerous cities in upstate New York, and her artwork can be seen...

Courtney Michelle Love is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and actress whose career has spanned four decades. She has had a significant impact on female-fronted alternative acts and performers, with NME naming her one of the most influential singers in alternative culture between 1990 and 2020.

Paul McCarthy is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Penelope Houston is an American singer-songwriter best known as the singer for the San Francisco-based punk rock band the Avengers. She was raised in Seattle. In the mid-1970s she attended Fairhaven College in Bellingham, Washington. In 1977, Houston moved to San Francisco, attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and shortly after became the lead singer and songwriter for the Avengers....

Errol Mark Morris is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and the invention of the Interrotron. In 2003, his The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight &...

David Johnson was the Iowa State Senator from the 1st District and served as assistant minority leader. A former Republican and currently independent, he served in the Iowa Senate from 2003 to 2019 and served in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1999 to 2003.

Laura Kipnis is an American cultural critic, essayist, educator, and former video artist. Her work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the department of radio-TV-film, where she teaches...

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto NPk was a Pakistani politician and statesman who served as the 9th Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977, and prior to that as the 4th President of Pakistan from 1971 to 1973. He was also the founder of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and served as its chairman until his execution in 1979.