The Lost Church

The Lost Church began in 2011 inside the living room of founders Brett and Elizabeth Cline, located in the Mission District. The couple had spent years touring as a musical duo and decided to convert their own home into a performance space to give local artists an intimate environment to share their work. They wanted a venue that felt like a haunted mansion crossed with a theater, complete with heavy red velvet curtains and old-fashioned footlights. What started as an unpermitted, grassroots project in a residential building eventually grew into a formal nonprofit organization dedicated to sustaining small-scale performance venues in the city.