When you love what you do it’s contagious.
A lean, tight-knit group of Artist/Administrators comprise our staff; all of whom focus on resources going straight to the kids. Some of whom have given decades to SFArtsED. Each member has an eye on our mission. They are dedicated to the arts and every day are fortunate to see tangible results through the participatory nature of our programs.
Complimentary artistic, administrative and nonprofit backgrounds are characteristic of their collective gifts, creating an exceptionally bright and creative environment for work and play, for administrators and our students.
SFArtsED Staff Profiles
Natalie A. Hala > Execitive Director, since 1997
A pioneer of arts basic in schools and the creator of granting programs that directly support individual artists in both North Carolina and Iowa, Ms. Hala has been Executive Director of SFArtsED since 1997. Her career as a leader of non-profit arts organizations has included posts as Director of the North Carolina Catawba County Council for the Arts and as Director of the Iowa Arts Council, a state agency. In addition she has served as a grant review panelist at the national and regional levels and served on four state grant review panels. Ms. Hala was instrumental in the development of the arts basic in Iowa schools, one of the first such programs in the country and taught college-level arts management courses in Chicago.
Emily Keeler > Artistic Director, since 1985
Ms Keeler has worked primarily in the Bay Area as a dancer, choreographer, educator and advocate since 1975. She was both a dancer and resident choreographer for the San Francisco Moving Company for eight years and a principal dancer for Cliff Keuter's New Dance Company and Joe Goode Performance Group. Ms Keeler has choreographed for numerous companies, both modern and ballet, including Joffery Dancers, Oakland Ballet and DanceArt and has been a movement consultant and choreographer for American Conservatory Theater, Magic Theatre, George Coates Performance Works, Pickle Family Circus, Make*a*Circus, Z Space and Choral Chameleon in New York City. Ms. Keeler has been a resident artist and lecturer at DeAnza College, Mills College, San Francisco State and at the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. She is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Choreographic Fellowships and has been a judge at both the Colorado Dance Festival and the American College Dance Festival.
Ms. Keeler served for three years as the dance member of the San Francisco Arts Commission and is currently an MFA student at San Francisco State in Creative Writing. She has been the artistic director of SFArtsED for 26 years. She respectfully thanks her teachers Roberta Humphrey, John Wilson, Aaron Osbourn, Margaret Jenkins, Alonzo King, Yehuda Maor, Kahz Zamuda, John Lasky and Cooley Windsor.
Camille Olivier-Salmon > Program Director, since 1985
Ms. Olivier-Salmon is the founder and acting Artistic Director of Brisbane Dance Workshop. She has taught children's dance and produced children’s productions for over 25 years. Camille received a Bachelor of Arts in Choreographic Design and was an American Dance Festival and National Dance Guild scholarship recipient. She has studied and performed professionally in New York City, Louisiana and in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has worked with SFArtsED since 1985: first as an Artist-In-Residence in the schools, as choreographer for the Event of the Year, and presently as Program Director. She served on the Board of Trustees for the Brisbane School District for twelve years and co-chair of SF Arts Providers Alliance for three years.
Kathleen Moore > Administrative Coordinator, since 1994
Ms. Moore joined the SFArtsED staff in 1994. She has a BA in Physical Education with a Dance Emphasis from San Francisco State University and spent many years in retail management, garnering numerous national awards for excellence in the process before returning to the arts. She was a founding member of Oblong Rhonda Dance Theater and TRANSIT Dance Company. Other experience includes wardrobe/costuming work for Lenwood Sloan’s Jubilee Minstrels and various dance companies. She has taught creative movement and dance to senior citizens in the Tenderloin community. She is a past executive board member of Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians and The Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center.
Chad Jones > Development and Communications Director, since 2010
Mr. Jones comes to SFArtsED from Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where he served as communications manager. As a journalist, he has been covering theater in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1992. For 10 years he served as chief theater critic for the Bay Area News Group-East Bay, a chain of daily newspapers that includes the Oakland Tribune, the Tri-Valley Herald and the San Mateo County Times. Mr. Jones is a proud graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno and was a long-time member of the American Theatre Critics Association. He has served for more than a decade on the Glickman committee, which awards a cash prize to the best play to debut in the Bay Area, and he was the San Francisco correspondent for the London-based magazine Plays International. As a freelance writer, his work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the Sacramento Bee, the Palo Alto Weekly and Theatre Bay Area magazine.