You’re Invited to Unpacked Live
Thursday, March 26, 2026 / 6 p.m.–8 p.m.
At the HALL Arts Hotel
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The Afar Unpacked Live event is now full — thank you so much for your interest!
If you’d like to be added to the waitlist, please email Michelle at [email protected].
Aislyn Greene
Podcast Director, Afar
Aislyn Greene’s wanderlust struck at age eight when her aunt returned from Paris with a gift: a poster of the Seine at night. (The tattered remnants live in a trunk with her Snoopy watch and Brownie badges.) Since then, she’s traveled wherever and whenever possible.
Greene has lived in France, hiked the wilds of Patagonia, and sailed to the bottom of the world (Antarctica). Prior to her current role, she was the Northwest travel editor at Sunset magazine. At Afar, she produces three shows, including Travel Tales by Afar and Unpacked by Afar. She lives on a houseboat in Sausalito with her wife and one grumpy cat.
Barbara Bestow
Bestor Architecture Founder
Bestor is the principal and founder of Bestor Architecture. The Los Angeles-based studio is recognized for experimental architecture that engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life by creating “strange beauty” to enhance everyday experiences.
Projects include Ashes & Diamonds Winery in Napa, the ICA Museum in LA, the IKAR Center for Jewish Life, the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, Nike’s LA Headquarters, the restoration of Lautner, Schindler, and other iconic modern masterpieces, and multiple buildings at the historic Sunnylands compound in Rancho Mirage. Bestor is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake, and a four-time AD100 honoree.
Obi Kaufmann
Author and Artist
Obi Kaufmann has dedicated his life to studying California’s natural world. In his first, genre-breaking work, The California Field Atlas, he depicts California as a networked system of living forces comprising a super-entity, that although wounded, remains capable of incredible resiliency despite humanity’s voracious extractivism.
In his subsequent works, The State of Water, The Forests of California, and The State of Fire: Why California Burns, Kaufmann continues his artistic and analytic investigation into deeper realms of ecology, art, and philosophy. When not backpacking the backcounty, you can find the poet/painter at his desk in Oakland.
Roderick Wyllie
Landscape Architect
Roderick Wyllie is a founding partner of Surfacedesign, Inc., a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in San Francisco, California. Among its many accolades, the firm has received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award (2017), multiple ASLA honors, a finalist distinction for the 2023 Rosa Barba Award, and the title of Best of the West from Architect’s Newspaper in 2022.
Wyllie has led a variety of complex projects within the office, including the reimagining of Hudson’s Detroit; Mission Bay Bayfront Park, the Lands End Visitor Center, and the Barnacles at Pier 9 in San Francisco; as well as Expedia HQ in Seattle.