Dena Beard is the executive director of The Lab, a 34-year-old nonprofit experimental music and art space in San Francisco. At The Lab since 2014, Beard led the organization through a rehabilitation of its facility and inaugurated a new program of commissioned artistic projects. She served as an assistant curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive for six years and earned a master’s degree in art history, theory and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2015, she curated a major exhibition by UC Davis art professor Lucy Puls at the Verge Center for the Arts in Sacramento.