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Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9)

Storied: San Francisco

Release Date: 03/04/2025

Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus) show art Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Check out my conversation with previous guest as we chat about Lincoln’s new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco. Look for Lincoln at the following events for his new book: April 29: He will be in conversation with Bill Issel discussing the book and what it can teach us about San Francisco today. Hosted by the at the Roar Shack, 34 7th Street, from 6–8 p.m. May 1: He will be in conversation at the University Club with Corey Busch, who served on Moscone’s senate staff, was a senior member of Moscone’s mayoral campaign staff, press...

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Kundan Baidwan, Part 2 (S7E12) show art Kundan Baidwan, Part 2 (S7E12)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, Kundan tell us about her decision to move to San Diego for college, where she would join her older sister, who’d been there for several years. But before that move south, she joined her sister and her sister’s friends on a backpacking adventure in Europe. After some time there, Kundan and her sister went to India to visit family there. Then she came back to go to school. What began as the study of psychology gradually gave way for Kundan to take more and more art and film classes. Eventually, she re-declared as an art major. She graduated in five years, and among the friends she...

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The 68th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival (S7 bonus) show art The 68th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Listen in as SFFILM Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks and I discuss this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. Topics include: SFFILM’s festival spotlight The film Please visit for more info, including where to RSVP for free events and where to get tickets for ticketed events. We recorded this episode over Zoom in April 2025.

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Kundan Baidwan, Part 1 (S7E12) show art Kundan Baidwan, Part 1 (S7E12)

Storied: San Francisco

It’s not often that I feature someone for the first time who’s already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan. Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan’s previous appearances on the show: (2018) (2024) Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan’s life—the legendary SF bar where she’s bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself. We...

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The Tenderloin Museum Turns 10 (S7 bonus) show art The Tenderloin Museum Turns 10 (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

The Tenderloin Museum turns 10 years old this summer, and I for one am here to celebrate that. We first visited early last year, when we talked with museum Executive Director Katie Conry. This bonus episode is all about the many, many programs going on as they approach a milestone anniversary. To start us off, we hear from Program Director Alex Spotto. Alex shares many (but not all) of the upcoming events Tenderloin Museum is either producing or affiliated with. They include: a new production of the (opens tomorrow, April 11!) an art show by (up through May) (film screening and...

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Woody LaBounty, Part 2 (S7E11) show art Woody LaBounty, Part 2 (S7E11)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley across The Bay. During that one year of college, he lived at his grandmother's house in the Outer Richmond. His parents had recently split up, and both his parents moved, separately, to Marin.   In fact, Woody says, his parents' moves north forced him to think about and start to consider that San Francisco was and would perhaps always be his home. Time has proven that to be true, of course. But to his young-adult mind, it just felt right for that moment. He'd spent a little time in Marin, and it...

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We Players’ “Macbeth” at Fort Point (S7 bonus) show art We Players’ “Macbeth” at Fort Point (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group. Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of , a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who’ll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can. While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as...

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Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11) show art Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11)

Storied: San Francisco

On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850. In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of . But he’s so, so much more than that. He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco. On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His...

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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street.   The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events...

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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer. Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back. One...

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One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in.

In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs Ask Me SF, a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode.

We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed.

Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town, and so she found it hard to relate fully to folks around her. Her family was in North Carolina, and Alabama before Ellen was born, because her dad, who’s a doctor, went to school but also wanted to go to small towns in the US to run his practice. He did well in that sense, but his American-born Chinese kids not so much.

The family moved to Taiwan when Ellen was 10, and that presented new challenges because of her decade in the US.

Before that move, she had taken up violin and piano (“like a good Asian kid,” she says) and dabbled in visual art. She drew and did some painting at home and at school, back when schools had art classes.

She kept that going in Taiwan. But she experienced culture shock just the same. Remember: She arrived when she was 10, and so she spent those very formative early teen years in a familiar but also not familiar part of the world. Other kids at the American school she attended were mostly relatable. But Taiwanese folks who’d never left their homeland presented some friction for folks like Ellen.

When it came time to choose a college, her parents encouraged her to do a pre-med program, but left room for that track not to stick with their daughter. She chose Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and ended up minoring in Visual Communication.

We go on a short sidebar here about Ellen’s older sister, Helen. Despite the age difference and their varied experiences back in Taiwan, the two have always been close.

[There’s a brief pause in the recording at this point. We relocated to the backyard at Ocean Ale House when the band began to play.]

Nowadays, in hindsight and with some life lived between then and now, Ellen has come to appreciate her ancestral homeland.

She says it was never a question whether to come back to the US for college. A counselor helped her choose a school that was both good for pre-med and had a solid art program. She chose Washington University sight-unseen.

She did pre-med, but only for the first two years. Then she switched, with her sister’s encouragement, to business with a vis-com minor. Ellen graduated in four years and set off for the East Coast.

Check back next week for Part 2 and Ellen’s move to San Francisco.

We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.

Photography by Nate Oliveira