The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is pleased to announce the addition of two new members to its staff. In August, Elizabeth Upshur will join the BAM/PFA as Webmaster, and Alla Efimova will join the museum's curatorial department as Assistant Curator.

Webmaster Elizabeth Upshur brings with her extensive experience as a software engineer, technical producer, and web designer. Before joining the staff at BAM/PFA, Ms. Upshur was Associate Software Engineer with CNET, San Francisco, and had also worked as a freelance designer. As Webmaster, Ms. Upshur will assist in maintaining and expanding what has come to be recognized as one of the most innovative and extensive museum websites internationally. Identified in 1997 as one of the world's top seven museum websites by Philadelphia-based arts organization MUSEE, the BAM/PFA website-www.bampfa.berkeley.edu-currently offers visitors singular opportunities for engaging with the museum's collections, as well as with arts communities and with artists themselves.

Alla Efimova received her Bachelor of Arts from New York University before completing a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Rochester in 1997. She has worked in curatorial departments at both the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York, and at the International Center of Photography, New York. In addition, Dr. Efimova is co-founder and a board member of The Archive: Jewish Immigrant Culture, a non-profit organization started in 1996 to record the experience of the Soviet-Jewish diaspora in the United States, and has organized conferences and lecture series that include "Collage and Post-Communist Madness" at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and "Issues in Contemporary Jewish Art" at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Efimova also has extensive expertise as a researcher and lecturer in the fields of modern and contemporary art and art theory, having taught Art History at UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, and the University of Rochester.

The BAM/PFA is the principal visual arts center of the University of California at Berkeley. One of the largest university art museums in the United States, the museum opened the doors of its distinctive, 31,000-square-foot building on the south side of campus in 1970. In addition to a challenging schedule of art exhibitions and an active education program, the museum houses the Pacific Film Archive, which premiered in January 1971, and which remains one of the nation's most acclaimed and comprehensive film collections and exhibition programs.