Body of Work
Elizabeth Pepin Silva is a photographer, documentary filmmaker, researcher and writer. Ever since Elizabeth can remember, she has been going to the beach. Born near San Francisco, CA, and growing up a few blocks from The City’s notorious Ocean Beach, surfing lurked in and around her thoughts until 1985, when a free surfboard and cheap wetsuit came her way. After receiving her degree in journalism from San Francisco State University (1994), she began her career as a print journalist before transitioning to television, working for fourteen years as a staff producer at KQED, a public television station in San Francisco. Recently Elizabeth has struck out on her own as a full time independent media maker for both clients and her own personal photo, film and writing projects. On the Waterfront Creative showcases her varied talents and extensive history of creative and professional work.
Water Women
Elizabeth has a long standing interest in women’s surfing and representations of women. In 1996, dismayed by the lack of photographs of women surfers in mainstream surf media, she began taking her camera to the beach. From that process emerged her distinctive “WaterWomen” surf photo project. It was this project that first brought Krista Comer and Elizabeth together — Krista so admired these photos and sought Elizabeth out for conversation and advice. A friendship deepened over the years as Krista’s and Elizabeth’s work aligned through shared surfeminisms. Elizabeth’s unique and realistic images of women surfers, shot with both water housings and long lenses, began appearing in museums and galleries, including San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the San Jose Museum of Art. She has shot images for newspapers and magazines around the world, including Wahine and SG. Her images have been featured in nearly a dozen books on surfing including prominently in Surfer Girls in New World Order (Duke University Press 2010) and Surfing: Women of the Waves (Gibbs Smith Publishers 2008).
As a documentary filmmaker, Elizabeth has won five Emmy Awards and several film festival awards for her projects including Coastal Clash (2004), a PBS documentary on problems facing our coastlines, as well as One Winter Story (2006), an hour-long look at the life of big wave surfer and scientist Sarah Gerhardt. More recently, Elizabeth teamed up with filmmaker and photographer Paul Ferraris to produce La Maestra, the Teacher (2015), a half-hour day-in-the-life documentary about Mayra Aguilar, an inspirational young Mexican woman surfer and teacher who lives in a southern Baja fishing village. La Maestra is a great classroom film for prompting thoughtful discussions of globalization, gender, the body, and North/South cultural and environmental geographies, and is being used at universities in both the United States and Spain, as well as by youth based organizations in California, Mexico, and Central America. At the film’s European debut at the International Surf Film Festival, in Anglet, France, it won the “Most Inspirational Surfer” award. La Maestra has been screened throughout Spain, and received media attention recently in Japan. To see where the film is going next, see the La Maestra Facebook page.
Currently, Elizabeth and Paul are busy with several surf documentaries in production.
- Linda & Joyce (working title) is a sixty-minute documentary that follows the lives of two of the world’s first professional surfers, Linda Benson and Joyce Hoffman. An examination of their careers serves also as departure point for an exploration of the history of Southern California’s coastline, where the surf industry was born, and the image of the California Surfer Girl was created, marketed, and disseminated worldwide. While Linda and Joyce were being promoted as the real life embodiment of the Beach Boys songs, the reality of their lives was very different, and set precedents that are still affecting women surfers to this day.
- The Real Surf Mamas of Pleasure Point explores the unique challenges women surfers face when they decide to become pregnant, and the ways in which a group of Santa Cruz, California women band together to support and encourage each other to surf through their pregnancies and return to the water once their children have been born.
- Frosty looks at the real life of Richard “Frosty” Hesson, an early Maverick’s big wave surfer who’s friendship and mentorship of professional surfer Jay Moriarity is chronicled in the Hollywood film Chasing Maverick’s.
Elizabeth is also a writer with serious interests and personal history in the Bay Area music scene. Her first book, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, was published by Chronicle Books in 2006, and just reissued with updates in 2017. Her current book in progress is about the late 1970s and ’80s alternative music and arts scene in San Francisco. She is a frequent contributor to weekly newspapers and magazines.
Elizabeth brings the Institute Steering Committee her talents as a visual artist and writer as well as a lifetime of experience in surfing, and in navigating surf industry as a woman filmmaker. Her clear, considered thinking and her no-nonsense delivery, are among the reasons why others listen when she speaks. That she is also a generous spirit is all the more a gift.
Today Elizabeth lives in Ojai, CA, with her husband, dog, cat, several hens, and local wildlife. She continues to surf and organize her life around the water and can frequently be found paddling out at little known spots along Ventura’s coastline.