City Arts & Lectures

This is an encore of a program originally broadcast in July 2024.   Since their foundational philosophical critique of gender and sexuality, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has been a singularly important contributor to our contemporary understanding of those categories, including what it can mean to be queer.  Butler’s revolutionary cultural influence and constant drive towards better understandings of our world guarantee that they will remain a widely read canonical writer for decades to come. In recent years, Butler’s theoretical and activist work on gender performance and nonviolence has placed them in conversations around transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, and the Occupy Movement. Their forthcoming book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, examines why recent authoritarian governments and transexclusionary feminists have focused so much of their energy and ire on gender.

On June 13, 2024, Judith Butler came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to be interviewed on stage by Poulomi Saha,  the co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

This is an encore of a program originally distributed in 2024. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author, and one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals working today. In books like Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari examines topics like the future of humanity, and the connections between biology, myth, and power.  His latest book is Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, from the Stone Age to AI.
On October 1, 2024, Yuval Harari appeared at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to technology journalist, author, and podcaster Kara Swisher. 

Sally Mann is one of the most significant American photographers of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Mann has explored childhood, family, memory, mortality, and the passage of time, often through experimental and historic photographic processes. From At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), a nuanced study of girls on the cusp of adolescence, to her landmark series, Immediate Family (1985–1994), occasionally staged photographs of her three children, taken with an 8×10 view camera. In more recent years, Mann turned her lens toward the land itself, using the American South as a site of both personal and collective memory. Mann is the subject of the documentary films Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (1994). Her memoirs include Hold Still, and now Art Work: On the Creative Life.

On February 11, 2026, Sally Mann came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with teacher, writer, and photographer Ted Orland. 

This is an encore presentation of a program originally aired in November of 2024.  In this program, two novelists who've created visions of a future after significant climate change...talk about whether their fiction can help shape reality.  Across his life, Richard Powers has been driven by an insatiable curiosity for humans and the world around us. This has led him from budding scientist to award-winning author, from Bangkok to the Netherlands, and has helped him win a Pulitzer Prize and a Macarthur Genius Grant. Powers is best known for his novels, including The Gold Bug Variations, named a Time Book of the Year, The Echo Maker, which received a National Book Award, and The Overstory, which received a Pulitzer Prize. Powers’ fourteenth novel, Playground delves into the lives of artists, scientists, and teachers who choose to start seastedding - living on floating cities. On October 30, 2024, Richard Powers came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with fellow novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future.

Legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson was one of the most remarkable figures in LGBTQ+ history – central to the Stonewall Riots and the gay liberation movement at large. Her remarkable life story is captured in a new biography by artists and filmmaker Tourmaline. Tourmaline is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work is dedicated to Black trans joy and freedom. She is a TIME 100 Most Influential Person in the World awardee and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has frequently appeared on ABC News, as well as in the New York Times and Vogue. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the Getty Museum. She created the critically acclaimed film Happy Birthday, Marsha!, and she has directed Pride campaigns for Dove, Marc Jacobs, and Reebok. She previously worked with Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. She lives in Miami, Florida.

Kate Schatz is the New York Times-bestselling author of the “Rad Women” book series and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. Her novel Where the Girls Were is forthcoming in 2026 from Dial Press.
 

On December 10, 2025, Tourmaline came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to talk to Kate Schatz about her bool "Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson".