Annual Celebration Will Be Held at BAMPFA on Saturday, May 2

(Berkeley, CA) January 14, 2026—The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive announced today that its 2026 fundraising benefit will pay tribute to the visual artist Stephanie Syjuco and chef Alice Waters, two distinguished visionaries in the arts and culture. Syjuco and Waters are the fifth pair of honorees to be celebrated at BAMPFA’s annual Art and Film Benefit, an event that reflects the museum’s unique dual dedication to these two art forms. Proceeds from the benefit support the full scope of BAMPFA’s mission, with a particular focus on the museum’s student engagement programs.

“The Art and Film Benefit is a celebration of everything that makes BAMPFA extraordinary—our artists, our educators, and our community. We look forward to welcoming supporters from across the Bay Area to join us in sustaining BAMPFA’s vital role on campus and beyond,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm. 

“We are thrilled to honor two extraordinary visionaries whose groundbreaking work is deeply rooted in education and our Berkeley community. Stephanie Syjuco is a world-renowned artist and esteemed UC Berkeley professor whose powerful investigations into representations of history and the archive continue to inspire new generations of students and artists with her current Art Wall project in the museum’s Crane Forum. An iconoclastic pioneer of sustainable farm-to-table cuisine, Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse—named after a character in Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy from the 1930s—has welcomed BAMPFA’s visiting filmmakers since the 1970s. Since the earliest days of BAMPFA, Alice and Chez Panisse have played a major role at the intersection of cinema, community, and cuisine.”

This year’s event will center on a cocktail reception, gala dinner, and nightcap lounge, along with a speaking program with BAMPFA leadership, including tribute videos to the two honorees. It will be held on site at BAMPFA, where Syjuco’s large-scale site-specific installation Present Tense (Roll Call) is currently on display in the museum’s Crane Forum.

A core component of BAMPFA’s Art and Film Benefit is the impact of attendees’ charitable giving on supporting the student experience at BAMPFA, instantiating the museum’s deep commitment to serving UC Berkeley students through education, programming, and professional development. 

This year’s host committee for the Art and Film Benefit features a distinguished roster of arts leaders and philanthropists, including Honorary Chair Sharon Simpson, along with Sadie Barnette, Cari Borja and Lloyd Bernberg, Diedrick Brackens, Catharine Clark, Cheryl Dunye, Cristina Salas-Porras Hudson, Isaac Julien, Jeffrey Lee, Peter and Bev Lipman, Noel Nellis, Bernard and Barbro Osher, Robert Riccardi, Charmin Roundtree, Mary Ryan, Komal Shah and Guarav Garg, Cissie Swig, Catherine Wagner and Loretta Gargan, and Wayne Wang.

Tables are now on sale; single tickets will go on sale on January 27. To learn more and purchase tickets, please contact Alexis Gordon, Assistant Director of Individual Giving, at alexisgordon@berkeley.edu or visit bampfa.org/page/benefit-2026.

About the Honorees

Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019–20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. A longtime educator, she is a Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.

Alice Waters

Alice Waters is a chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California. She has been a champion of local organic agriculture for over four decades. In 1995, with a background in Montessori education, she founded the Edible Schoolyard Project at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. Applying the Montessori philosophy of learning-by-doing, the program uses an organic garden and on-site kitchen classroom to teach all academic subjects. The Edible Schoolyard Project model has been replicated in over six thousand schools around the world.

In 2015 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, proving that eating is a political act. In 2022, she was awarded the inaugural Carver Carson Award for American innovation in environmental protection and agriculture from the Henry Ford Museum. In 2023, she received the No Kid Hungry Humanitarian Award from Share Our Strength in Los Angeles, and in 2024 she was honored to receive the Julia Child Award. Most recently, in October 2025, Waters was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from Heyday Books in Berkeley, CA. She is the author of seventeen books including her latest, A School Lunch Revolution.

About BAMPFA

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) ignites cultural change for a more inclusive and artistic world. BAMPFA has been uniquely dedicated to art and film since 1970, with international programming that is locally connected and globally relevant. It holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in its collection, with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art and historical Chinese painting, as well as the world’s largest collection of African American quilts. As part of the University of California, Berkeley, BAMPFA is committed to artistic diversity through its robust slate of art exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, live performances, and educational programs that shed new light on the art of the past and connect our audiences with leading filmmakers and artists of our time. BAMPFA sits on the edge of campus and downtown Berkeley, where it welcomes visitors from across and beyond the Bay Area in a repurposed building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.