Shapeshifters Cinema

About Us

SHAPESHIFTERS CINEMA provides a venue and support for contemporary artists working with experimental and artist-made film, video, sound, music and other types of mediated performance. We host screenings and performances by local and visiting artists in our intimate 40-seat theatre and offer workshops on a variety of experimental and DIY moving image and sound production. Our storefront shop specializes in print publications, DVDs, sound recordings and other kinds of media made by artists who have screened or performed in our venue.

SHAPESHIFTERS BREWERY makes a variety of small-batch, seasonal, hand-crafted beers, brewed on-site in a space right behind the cinema. These are served (to 21+) at all our events as well as some off-site events. Find out more at shapeshiftersbrewery.com

SHAPESHIFTERS CAFÉ, is right next door to our cinema! We offer freshly-made salads, sandwiches, coffee, tea, pastries and more. Open Monday-Friday 6am-2pm and every Saturday 10am-2pm. Find out more at shapeshifterscafe.com

Staff

Gilbert Guerrero - Operations Director & A/V Tech
Kathleen Quillian - Programming Director
Ellie Vanderlip - Education & Outreach Director

The Shapeshifters Membership program provides crucial, sustaining support for our small, DIY, volunteer-run organization. By joining the membership program, you become part of an engaged, diverse, creative community working in and around experimental moving image, sound and time-based art. Each level offers a range of access to members-only resources and events, discounts, comps and more. Find out more and join now!

Cinema

Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues is a series curated by Amy Reid and Kathleen Quillian that is dedicated to exploring the visions, voices, concerns and lineage of women, non-binary, genderqueer and trans filmmakers through public film screenings, workshops, conversations and presentations. New programs are presented monthly at Shapeshifters. Find out more.

Upcoming Programs & Events

Jennifer Reeves: Screening + Blu-ray compilation release
Presented in association with San Francisco Cinematheque
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
7pm
Admission: $15 (discount for members)

Film maven Jennifer Reeves joins us from NYC to screen new digital masters of nine of her 16mm film-based works which have just been released on a new Blu-ray compilation by Re:Voir. Join us to celebrate this release and to revisit a selection of Reeves' works made over the past several decades in all-new 2K form.

Screening: Fear of Blushing (2001), We Are Going Home (1998), Landfill 16 (2011), Color Neutral (2014), Strawberries in the Summertime (2014), Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome (2022), Configuration 20 (1994), Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992), and The Girl's Nervy (1995).

NOTE: Jennifer Reeves will also appear at Gray Area, San Francisco on January 15 to present her double-projected 16mm/digital video hybrid work The Gloria of Your Imagination (2024–2025). Full details here.

Zoe Beloff: Life Forgotten & Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People
Friday, January 16, 2026
7pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

NYC-based media archeologist Zoe Beloff joins us to screen two of her latest films—both set in the artist's Lower East Side neighborhood, both looking at its history as a place of immigrants and at different ways that popular entertainment brings people together.

Set in New York's Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, Life Forgotten (2025, 16mm film shown on DV) centers on a real storefront cinema—Frank Seiden's Variety Theater—where silent movies were presented with improvised dialog and Yiddish ballads by Frank and his sons to an audience that didn't hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for women's rights and change their world. Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People (2025, DV) is a work of remembrance that asks but does not answer the question how does everyday art bring people together? One by one, the community that is the Mouse People, recite the text of Franz Kafka's short story in quiet places on New York's Lower East Side. The film presents Josephine's story, as something transmitted across time, something that comes from inside the body of an oppressed people; spoken alone, summoned mysteriously, at the edge of consciousness. Why was it that Josephine's voice so captivated them?

Thomas Carnacki, Petra Zélie & S*Glass
Sunday, January 18, 2026
7pm
Admission: $15 (discount for members)

An evening of sonic textures, projected imagery, and perhaps a tardigrade, featuring Thomas Carnacki, Petra Zélie and S. Glass—three sets for the price of one evening—each performance approaching the notion of "experimental music" from a different practical angle, but unified by a shared sense of immersion, subtlety, and perhaps the uncanny.

Thomas Carnacki is a variably-sized entity engaged in unsettling textures, organic sources, occasional flights of whimsy, and (aspirationally) subtle nuance. Though sometimes brief spasms of wanton abandon enter the proceedings. Contributing musicians down the years have included Gregory Hagan, Sheila Bosco, Agnes Szelag, Jesse Burson, the late Jim Kaiser, though for this current evening the instantiation will be Cheryl E. Leonard and Gregory Scharpen. Carnacki music has appeared in numerous films, theatre pieces, and internationally-touring dance performances, including an evening-length work by Margaret Jenkins that toured Sweden. Carnacki has released over a dozen records of varying in sizes (from 3" to 12"), about which people have opined things such as: "ectoplasmic tendrils form unfathomable noises as unknown machines creak, click, and rattle...This is a whole other world where art and the afterlife briefly touch."

Petra Zélie is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and experimental sound composer whose work spans film, performance, and sonic art. Her feature film The Yellow Wallpaper (2022) has won Best Narrative Feature at multiple international festivals and will be included in the Van Gogh Museum's "Yellow" exhibition (Amsterdam, February 2026). As an experimental sound artist, Zélie creates immersive compositions utilizing granular synthesis, voice manipulation, and site-specific interventions. Recent performances include Stanford University, UC Berkeley, SF Sound, and The Hive Oakland, and the La Cloaca festival in Mexico City (December 2025).

S*Glass creates electro-acoustic sound collages with tape music, electronic processing, voice, found sound, and chance operations. Every show uses a different batch of curated audio, mixed live, while the self-produced studio albums are more refined assemblages. The playing of non-musical objects is sometimes incorporated (dental floss, aluminum foil, wind-up toys, metal lunch box, cabbage). Self-shot video is screened during sets, which is mostly textures made with multiple layers that slowly wobble out of sync, jump cuts, and a smattering of primitive animation. The overall effect is one of surreal disorientation. S*Glass is a founder of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble (a large non-musical music group begun in the early 1980s), and Glands of External Secretion (a duo with rock musician Barbara Manning since the early ’90s). From the late ’80s until 2004, he was the main driver behind Bananafish. Since 2017, he’s performed as a solo artist and completed U.S. tours of the West Coast, New England, parts of the South and Midwest, England and Scotland, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and a handful of places in Canada.

ATRIUM Alternative Art Fair
January 22-25, 2026
Opening reception Thursday, January 22, 6-9pm
Minnesota Street Projects, San Francisco
https://www.atriumfair.com/

Shapeshifters Cinema is excited to be a participating venue in ATRIUM—a new, free, alternative art fair showcasing the best emerging, underground and established contemporary art galleries in the Bay Area and beyond. Taking place at Minnesota Street Projects January 22–25 during SF Art Week, ATRIUM brings together 20+ galleries that will present featured selections from their programs—plus SKYLIGHT ABOVE, an upstairs exhibition of artist-run spaces.

Shapeshifters will be showing a selection of film, video and multimedia works by Tommy Becker; Karel Doing; Facing West Shadows; Ariana Gerstein; Lisa Marr; Kristin Reeves; Jeremy Rourke; Scratch Film Junkies; Shapeshifters Cinema Performance Group + Edan More, Seraphina Perkins & Jasmine Zhang; Nadia Shihab; and Thingamajigs Performance Group.

The weekend-long event is free and open to the public with an opening reception on Thursday, January 22 from 6–9pm. Meet us there!

Do-Over Music Series - Stephens / Goldberg / Street / Feygina / Glenn
Thursday, February 5, 2025
7pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

The Do-Over Music Series at Shapeshifters Cinema, organized by Lisa Mezzacappa and Jordan Glenn, is a monthly series of sound performances presented by a rotating cast of local luminaries and special guests. The first set features performances of creative - improvised - composed - electronic - acoustic - music. The second set opens up to a live improvised collaboration of sound and visuals made using images culled from the Shapeshifters 16mm film collection.

Set 1 (7pm): Marcus Stephens - saxophone and electronics

Set 2 (8pm): expanded cinema + improvised music with:

Marcus Stephens (saxophone and electronics)
Ben Goldberg (clarinet)
Indigo Street (guitar)
Mayya Feygina (bass)
Jordan Glenn (drums)
Films, film loops and other visual interventions by the Shapeshifters Performance Group (Ellie, Kathleen & Gilbert)

Workshops

Upcoming Workshops

We are working on scheduling more great workshops for you. Sign up on our mailing list and be the first to know about them!