ALAMEDA MAGAZINE -- After two years working in a commercial photo lab in Berkeley, she decided to return to school, completing her master’s in photography and interdisciplinary arts at San Francisco State University in 1990. Williamson eventually landed in Alameda where she and her husband have lived for the past 26 years, raising their two children. She has taught photography all over the Bay Area since 1988 and is on staff as an instructor at City College of San Francisco and Solano Community College.
Through her studies, she fell in love with hand-painted photographs, alternative and old-school photo processes, and making books by hand. Williamson works simultaneously from a Jingletown studio in Oakland — a purple building covered with mosaics that once housed The Institute of Mosaic Art — and at her home in Alameda and in the studios of the colleges where she teaches. Though much of her work is digital, she still shoots film and processes black and whites, van Dyke brown prints, and cyanotypes in the darkroom. Recently, she used a vintage 1967 Polaroid Land camera to shoot a series of portraits.