Zain Alam is an artist and musician whose interests include immigrant histories, Islamic culture, and South Asian diasporas. His recording project Humeysha has been described as, “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” and featured in Vice, Village Voice, and the New York Times. His work includes video, performance, and writing which has been supported most recently by Harvard University, The Laundromat Project, and South Asian American Digital Archive.
Tomie Arai is an artist who collaborates with local communities to create visual narratives that give meaning to the spaces we live in. She is a co-founder of the Chinatown Art Brigade and is currently a 2020 Transnational Fellow with Monument Lab, an initiative that reimagines public space through stories of social justice and equity.
Minju Bae is a historian, educator, and public humanist who works across the fields of Asian American Studies, urban and labor history, and food studies. Her current work investigates how Asian/Americans navigated the politics of work, racial difference, and the radical restructuring of the urban-based global economy in the late twentieth century. She is also a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development.
Crystal Baik is associate professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Riverside with training in feminist oral history, critical militarization studies, ethnic studies and visual culture studies. Her first single-authored monograph, Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, 2019), examines the everyday ramifications of the Korean War in the twenty-first century through a curated archive of diasporic memory works, including experiential oral history projects.
Emma Callahan is a multi-disciplinary performer, artist, and writer, raised in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from NYU Gallatin, with a focus on historical narrative in performing mediums. In her practice, she is interested in how the past is repeated in and told through the present. She is a member of the media collective 90 Degree, and 8 Ball Community. She also performs comedy.
Ronak Gandhi is an undergraduate student at Yale University majoring in humanities with a focus on immigrant and Asian American narratives. Since listening to his grandmother’s stories as child, his interest in oral history has deepened through research and coursework. Gandhi works at the Yale Asian American Cultural Center, building community and solidarity among the student body.
Cindy Gao is a PhD student in the American Studies program at NYU. Her dissertation research explores the role of communist Asia in the revolutionary imagination of postwar radical movements in the United States.
Rosario Joaquin is the senior public programs assistant at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. She is a resident assistant at NYU’s Rubin Hall, where she curates programs for the “Inequality and Justice” themed engagement community. Joaquin will graduate from the NYU College of Arts and Science in May 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in Politics and Asian/Pacific/American Studies.
Linda Kuo is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, born in Taiwan and raised in Hawai’i. She is the director for Dancers Unlimited, a bi-coastal company based in New York and Honolulu. She creates genre-blending movements that elevate individuals and communities, and facilitates conversations on critical social issues.
Rochelle Kwan is a writer, audio producer, and cultural organizer who brings together her backgrounds in social work and media to engage with communities to celebrate the power of everyday voices. Her work includes developing a community engagement program with A/PA communities at StoryCorps, training students to lay the foundation for the Hunter College Asian American Studies Oral History Archive, producing Chinatown community storytelling projects with Think!Chinatown, and cultivating meaningful relationships with A/PA communities through the podcast, “Self Evident.”
Sarah Lin serves as a chaplain affiliate and campus minister at NYU, and is studying public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has completed several research projects focused on gender-based violence within the Asian immigrant community, and previously interned at Womankind, formerly known as the New York Asian Women’s Center. She has been recognized as a Public Policy & International Affairs (PPIA) Fellow, as well as a Voorhees Public Service Fellow and Gardner Fellow in Leadership & Social Policy at Rutgers University. She holds a bachelor’s degree with highest honors from Rutgers University.
Sarah Nguyễn researches information science topics related to open source technologies impact on marginalized communities, behaviors around misinformation, digital preservation, preserving dance and movement, and data privacy practices. She is a PhD student in the Information School at the University of Washington.
Kyoung H. Park is a North Korean theater-maker, born and raised in Santiago, Chile, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. As artistic director of Kyoung’s Pacific Beat, a peacemaking theater company, he has written/directed three full-length plays—disOriented, Tala, and Pillowtalk—and has created over thirty-five community-based, experimental projects. His work centers stories of migration, queerness, and trauma. He holds an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University.
Kaina Quenga, a native of Hilo, Hawai‘i, is a professional hula dancer, advocate, and educator. Quenga is co-founder and artistic director of Te Ao Mana, a Polynesian cultural arts collective, and director of Nā ‘Ōiwi NYC, a New York City-based education and advocacy group that supports several movements to protect Indigenous lands and waters, including the Hōkūlea Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage, Indigenous Peoples Day NYC (IPDNYC) Coalition, and Mauna Kea protectors. At the end of January 2020, Quenga returned home to Hawai’i to pursue her education and advocacy efforts.
Loubna Qutami is assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, a member of al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and the former executive director of the Arab Cultural and Community Center (ACCC) in San Francisco. She is also a founder and the former international general coordinator of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).
Preeti Sharma is an assistant professor of American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her research and teaching interests include feminist theories of work, racialized and gendered labor, Asian American feminisms, women of color feminisms/queer of color critique, and worker center movements. Her book project, The Thread Between Them, examines the transnational beauty practice of threading in South Asian beauty salons across Los Angeles County through their emergence, labor, regulation, and organizing in the neoliberal immigrant service sector. She has supported numerous research justice and storytelling efforts, including the most recent animated short, I am a #YoungWorker, with the UCLA Labor Center on young workers in Los Angeles’s retail and restaurant industry. She is also co-lead author of Nail Files: A Study of Workers and Industry in the United States, the first national study on labor issues in the nail salon sector.
Chanika Svetvilas is an interdisciplinary artist who has presented her work at Stony Brook University, Queens Museum, ABCNoRio, Brooklyn Public Library, among other contexts and spaces. In 2020, she curated Unique Minds: Creative Voices, an exhibition of art and creative writing for Princeton University’s Mental Health Awareness Month. She is the co-founder of the collective ThaiLinks, and Thai Takes, a biennial Thai film festival presented in New York City (2003-07). Svetvilas earned a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Skidmore College, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. She is based in Princeton, New Jersey.
Lena Sze is a cultural organizer and writer from New York City. She received her PhD in American Studies at NYU, and has worked at a number of community-based arts spaces, cultural organizations, and public and private funders in Philadelphia and New York.
Vivian Truong is assistant professor of History at Swarthmore College. Her areas of study include Asian American studies, urban history, and women of color feminisms. Her current research examines Asian American and multiracial movements against police violence in late twentieth century New York City. She earned her PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan.
Diane Wong is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. Her interests include Asian American politics, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, cultural and media studies, and community-engaged research. As a first-generation Chinese American born and raised in Flushing, Queens, her research is intimately tied to the Asian diaspora and urban immigrant experience. She is a member of the Chinatown Art Brigade and co-founder of The W.O.W. Project located at Wing On Wo & Co.
Mi Hyun Yoon is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research looks at the history of the Korean diaspora in the United States through the transnational context of Asian America and Korea, and examines citizenship, nation, civil society, identity, and gender.
New York University:
Asian/Pacific/American Institute: Laura Chen-Schultz is Deputy Director at the A/P/A Institute at NYU, where she manages research projects and initiatives. She works in close collaboration with the repositories at NYU Libraries to build A/PA archival collections. Amita Manghnani, Associate Director of the A/P/A Institute at NYU, oversees public programs and communications, and assists in collection building. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives: Shannon O’Neill is curator of the Tamiment-Wagner Collections, and consultant for A/P/A Voices.