team
Susan Moffat
founder and executive director
Susan Moffat is an urbanist, curator and writer who is a long-time lover of the Albany Bulb. She has lectured on urban wilds and informal art at Stanford, SFMOMA, UC Davis, and the American Society of Landscape Architects annual conference. Trained as an urban planner, she has worked in the fields of affordable housing and environmental planning and as a journalist has published in the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BOOM: California and Estuary News. She teaches interdisciplinary courses at UC Berkeley in both the College of Environmental Design and the Arts & Humanities Division and is project director of the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative. She has been enjoying the Albany Bulb for decades. It reminds her of the vacant lots and wild spaces of her childhood.
ROBERT UNGAR
ART AND DESIGN ASSOCIATE
Robert Ungar is an Oakland-based architect, urban designer and a lover of informal public life. He researches adaptation of cities to climate change at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Francisco. He co-founded Tel Aviv-Yafo based ONYA Collective, an interdisciplinary group developing innovative urban interventions and runs community and art events in the field of urban ecology. The group designs with communities to propose new ways to use urban nature and space as tools to make life in public better. Robert has a Bachelor in Architecture from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where he also taught infographics and civic architecture and a Master in Urban Design from University of California, Berkeley.
Susan Ryan
Grantwriter and communications associate
Susan is an urban explorer, grant writer, and marketer who has a passion for transforming abandoned or underused spaces into community resources. She was the founding Program Manager for Playland at 43rd Avenue in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood, a formerly blighted school district property with an empty asphalt lot of approximately 1.5 acres and an abandoned school building. With the support of he San Francisco Planning Department's Groundplay program, and through community engagement and ongoing activation, the site is now a thriving neighborhood resource with a community garden, mini-skate park, opportunities for art making and exhibition, workshops and classes, and a gathering space for all. For nonprofit organizations, Susan serves in a fund development capacity, including writing grant proposals, conducting prospect research, and executing fundraising plans. She is thrilled to be involved with Love the Bulb’s efforts to preserve a former construction debris landfill as an art park and wild place for creative exploration.
Sarah McDonald
Program Coordinator
Sarah is program coordinator for Love the Bulb and a bookseller at Pegasus Books on Solano Avenue. Born and raised in Berkeley, Sarah fell in love with art practice, research, and critique in high school. Her work at the Albany Bulb grows out of her ongoing research on the necessary movement away from traditional gallery and museum settings in favor of publicly accessible and community oriented arts practice. Sarah has worked with Arts Access Aotearoa, a New Zealand nonprofit that advocates for people who experience barriers to participation in the arts as creators, audience members, and gallery and museum visitors.