Climate HQ Storytellers 2025 - 2026
Isabeau
MFA, Cinema
Project Title: "Daylight Saving"
In a not-so-distant future where solar power is controlled by authoritarian rule, a working-class civilian must choose between staying in the shadows or standing in the daylight. "Daylight Saving" is a fictionalized look at the very real threats of facism, resource depleation, and what can happen in the absence of organized, collective action.
About the Artist: Isabeau (she/her) is a queer, multidisciplinary Afro-diasporic creative based in the San Francisco Bay Area, working in filmmaking and performance. Originally from Miami, FL with familial connections to Haiti, Cuba, and Chile, her work explores themes of power, individual resistance to change, and liminal identities within a decolonial perspective. During her time in Los Angeles, she applied her producing expertise to photo shoots, live events, branded content, music videos, and commercials. She also was a Producer’s assistant for live-action film and animated television projects in development. Isabeau is currently pursuing her MFA at San Francisco State University and she is particularly interested in cinéma engagé ideology, queer theory, and the transnational influence of the Caribbean and its diaspora around the globe.
Delilah Soulouman Bender
MFA, Cinema
Project Title: "SILENCE"
When a revolution involving a mood enhancing drug causes a city to become loud and chaotic, a solitary sewer monster fights for its own survival. "SILENCE" is a stop motion animation that used recycled materials to build the majority of the creatures, objects, and sets. No AI was used in any stage of production.
About the Artist: Delilah Soulouman Bender (she/her) is a mixed media artist based in the Bay Area and an MFA student in Cinema with a focus on stop motion animation at SF State, where she earned her BA in Studio Art and a minor in Animation in 2024. Her undergraduate stop motion thesis film "So You've Found Yourself in the Nowhere Zone" was featured in the Palm Springs Animation Festival and was an honorable mention in the #MoStopMo Stop Motion Shorts Fest. Alongside a freelance Etsy shop running since 2019 and an art wall at downtown San Jose's KALIED gallery, she has completed public commissions for the city of San Jose, including a 4'x180' mural by Almaden Lake, two utility boxes, and a lenticular animated print for the San Jose Airport. She
Sarah Bermudez
MA, Philosophy
Project Title: "Borderlands"
Weaving philosophical introspection, grounded research, and Bay Area landscapes, this short visual essay reflects on our relationships with technology and nature, specifically AI and the myriad ways it impacts our shared futures. Grounded in acknowledgment of Indigenous land, the film pairs personal testimony with data on the environmental toll of California's data centers, which falls hardest on marginalized and Indigenous communities, reminding viewers that the generations growing up in the borderlands of these pressing techno-ecological issues deserve to be heard.
About the Artist: Sara Bermudez (she/her) is a master's student in Philosophy at San Francisco State University, where she also teaches Introduction to Critical Thinking. She is passionate about nature, child development, decolonial studies, animals, and social theory as well as an artist who loves to paint and draw (find her portfolio at bawdyhouz.com). She currently works in Marketing and Design at Stanford Law School, and does freelance work in illustration, branding, and UI/UX design.
Edward Chao
MA, Ethnic Studies
Project Title: "From the Ground Up"
This collective ethnographic documentary chronicles hope in the fight for climate justice. In a post-Covid world increasingly dependent on technology, the film follows youth members of Frontline Catalysts' Frontline Voices program as they step away from the constant pressure of survival to reconnect with nature and work to transform their community. Drawing on participatory action research (PAR) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodologies, the youth serve as co-creators of "From the Ground Up's" narrative, capturing what it means to grow up in Oakland, fight for more green spaces, and to build together as organizers and leaders. Each youth participant received a stipend for their involvement, funded through Edward Chow's own Storytellers' Fellowship stipend. The resulting project is, in-and-of-itself, an act of climate justice and decolonization by using reciprocity to platform the frontline youth most impacted by the climate crisis and who are working to shape the future of ecological resilliance in Oakland.
About the Artist: Edward Chao (he/him) is a Master's student in SFSU's Collecge of Ethnic Studies whose research explores the intersections of environmental justice and ethnic studies, including a thesis on lead contamination in Oakland, research on the impacts of ecotourism in Okinawa, and work on understanding salmon as a "family member" to trans-Pacific communities. Outside of school, Edward is a Program Manager at the Oakland-based nonprofit Frontline Catalysts. When not working, Edward can be found fishing, exploring Oakland's hidden green spaces, and entering caves they probably shouldn't.
Eve Grahn
Dual BA, Environmental Science & Cinema
Project Title: "Voices of the Climate Action Fellowship"
"Voices" highlights Climate HQ's Climate Action Fellowship and follows three Climate Action Fellows through a year of community-based climate projects from conception to realization. The Fellows include Akani James who designed a native food landscape for a local community farm, bringing drought-resistant crops from the Lisjan Ohlone food system into the farm's practices; Marcello Garbo who developed "InAs-based" luminescent solar concentrators that will let buildings generate their own energy; and Michael Morales who upcycles obsolete and disgarded audio devices such as telephones, using them to produce experimental music and with the goal of challenging mass consumerism while providing BIPOC artists with upcycled tools to express their own climate perspectives and art forms.
About the Artist: Eve Grahn (any/all) is a double major in Cinema and Environmental Science and a student in Climate HQ's Climate Change Certificate Program. They recently completed a year long academic internship under a local bay area cinematographer, and Eve is always seeking ways to apply their ecological knoweldge to the field of cinema.
Ariel Peraza
MA, Ethnic Studies
Project Title: "Tsa HO fa: To Lead Them Forward"
Tsa HO fa is an Indigenous-led horsemanship program serving native families and public school youth in what's recognized as the Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo county regions. This video project follows participants as they work with horses and share how these relationships nurture their emotional well-being, cultural identity, and connection to place. The film centers both leaders and the participants as knowledge keepers, challenging colonial views of knowing and understanding land and animals as resources. As parat of this project, the audience is invited into a sacred space that illustrates Indigenous lifeways of reciprocity and responsibility -- practices that are essential to the health and wellbeing of all people, animals, and the land existing within our rapidly changing ecologies.
About the Artist: Ariel Peraza (she/her/any) is a first-generation master's student in Ethnic Studies and a Latinx mother of Indigenous descent whose work focuses on Indigenous resurgence, healing justice, and the impacts of colonialism. After navigating state systems that harmed her as a young single mother, she sought care outside of institutions and found it in the Indigenous-led Tsa HO fa horsemanship program. There, learning through relationships with land, horses, and community showed her how colonialism has disconnected people from the land, their cultures, and one another. This experience led her to see healing justice and Indigenous resurgence as environmental justice, rooted in the understanding that humans, animals, and land sustain each other in a circular system of care.
David Recendiz-Tostado
BS, Environmental Science
Project Title: "Move Green"
Reflective and informative, "Move Green" is a short video exploring different forms of human movement and migration, and the socio-environmental impacts of those modalities on the San Francisco Bay Area. The project is a call to action to think more critically about the consiquences of our fossil fuel-based transportation systems and to imagine a world where we collectively "Move Green."
About the Artist: David Recendiz-Tostado (he/him) developed a deep commitment to environmental science and justice after witnessing polluted corridors and inequitable resource access while serving their community through state and local organizations. A queer, first-generation student currently finishing his senior year in Environmental Science at SFSU, David was raised in South Los Angeles by his mother where he experienced and observed the vast disparities in communities' exposure to toxic pollution and its deadly health impacts. David is also an Earthwatch Institute Fellow and recipient of the Los Angeles Citizen Award and Congressional Recognition for leadership with the California Association of Youth Courts.