The Bandung Residency
The Bandung 2024-25 Residency, presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) and The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), is an opportunity designed to uplift the work of artists, educators, and organizers whose practice is intended to foster solidarity between Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) and Black communities.
The Bandung Residency is made possible through the NYS AAPI Community Fund; the Ford Foundation; the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs with the support of NYC Council Members Crystal Hudson, Christopher Marte, Chi Ossé, and Sandra Ung; the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development; and Apicha Community Health Center.
Learn more about our 2024-25 Residents below.
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Project: Curatorial interventions set across Kicopi, the Korean owned convenience store franchise located throughout the Brooklyn borough. In collaboration with the store owners, the project will explore the convenience stores as sites of artistic exploration and curatorial inquiry in order to investigate the complicated historical conflict between Korean and Black communities in Brooklyn (and New York at large), question the historical narrative that pins the two communities against one another, and nurture allyship between these two communities.
Bio: Dylan Seh-Jin Kim (b.2000) lives and works in New York. His practice is interested in how curatorial intervention critiques and engages conditions of apparatus, keeping in mind the implication of the public and a responsibility in site specificity. He has organized and worked on exhibitions and programs at
MoMA PS1, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Unclebrother, Tutu Gallery, Columbia University, brownstones, restaurants, and elsewhere. He received a B.A. in Philosophy and Film and Media Studies from Columbia University in 2022.
Project: A city-wide interactive map based around sites of unity and conflict, providing context for these historical experiences around issues such as schools, housing, labor, and culture. Storefronts, subway stops, and street corners will be among the ‘landmarks’ that will reveal these site-specific events through oral histories, archival media, music and sound accessed through peoples’ phones via Augmented Reality.
Bio: Art Jones works with film/video, sculpture, and expanded media. His films and live media performance involves intensive recombination of antithetical video and audio elements into a cacophonous synthesis. His multimedia and installation work often incorporates site- specific projection surfaces and interactive elements. Jones’ work often utilizes mainstream media and popular culture as raw material to be sampled, remixed, and re-combined in order to examine implicit meanings or suggest new ones. Working within a particular genre or mode, the work seeks to reveal and re-orient the conventions of how
information is transmitted and received. Jones lives in the Bronx, New York.
Project: A multi-media exhibit where community, oral history, visual art, and spoken word will be centered. The exhibit aspires to honor the interwoven histories of three Black-South Asian transborder solidarity movements, and how these often invisibilized sites of collective liberation can inform organizing efforts today in confronting anti-blackness in the South Asian American diaspora.
Bio: Sonya Soni is a prison abolitionist, community organizer, community participatory researcher, social movement strategist, and writer-activist, passionate about confronting the web of carcerality that entraps black and brown communities both in the U.S. and her homeland of India. As a former youth with lived experience in the carceral state, she is passionate about creating spaces for black, brown, and indigenous youth organizers to become policymakers, defining their own paths for liberation. From Kashmir to Newark to South Los Angeles, Sonya has been steeped in transnational solidarity movement work with youth organizers who have been surveilled, policed, and incarcerated. She has worked for various social justice organizations on youth-centered policy initiatives, including Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research and former Mayor Cory Booker’s office. She co-led the Los Angeles County Youth Commission, the first youth-led government body in Southern California, and helped co-create the movement to abolish youth prisons across California. Sonya completed her B.S. in Public Health and Master’s of Public Health from the University of Southern California, and a second master’s degree at Harvard University, where she was a Harvard Women & Public Policy Program fellow. Sonya is currently a 2024 Kweli Literary Fellow, writing about Black-South Asian solidarity.
Project: An exploration of the cultural, economical, and aesthetic histories of indigo dyeing amongst Black and Asian communities as a potential to create mutual respect, build solidarity, and heal both communities through reconnection to ancient cultural practices. This will specifically focus on indigo’s prevalence across key Black and Asian societies, culminating one year of data gathering, discussion, and planning into a printed book or exhibition, and a single textile piece that incorporates collaboration with workshops from Black and Asian communities.
Bio: Rachael Louise Elliott is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary designer, artist, researcher, and rock climber. Her work is strongly informed by her West African ancestry, childhood in Detroit, and design studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. Elliott is the founder and creative director of Studio Senjeh, a multi-disciplinary design studio working on exhibition design, furniture, interiors, textiles, and objects. The studio creates spaces and objects driven by curiosity, craft, technology, nostalgia, and heritage. Part studio, part investigative platform, Studio Senjeh explores the beauty of ubiquity, the potential of shared knowledge and, exploration of imagined futures. Elliott studied architecture at Columbia University in the City of New York and at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Project: “Freedom Is A Place” is an archive documenting public art events by New York City abolitionist groups that opens space to engage in a collective reflection on the entangled praxis of placemaking as liberation. Spotlighting the pressing intersectional issues that communities face now, this project is envisioned as a toolkit, a future-making instrument to those rehearsing in solidarity.
Bio: Chong Gu (they/he/she) works with people, building materials, land, and texts. Their transdisciplinary process, hinged on hand model-making, frames diasporic domesticity and internalized trauma. Tracing social, spatial and material constructs of our urbanity, Chong’s work wrestles between axioms and senses, molding rooms for incremental resistance shared amongst heterogeneous communities. They have been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship, a Tina E. Yeh Community Service Fellowship from Yale, a Diane Lewis Travel Fellowship from The Cooper Union, amongst other grants and fellowships. Chong is currently a Postgraduate Associate at Yale Urban Design Workshop, where they are managing a vision planning process with a local public Montessori school in New Haven. Previously, they have gained architectural experiences at several international design practices, including SHoP (New York) and Neri&Hu (Shanghai). Occasionally a writer, Chong has published texts on MIT Thresholds, Yale Paprika! amongst others. They received an M.Arch from Yale University and a B.Arch from The Cooper Union.
Project: “Freedom Is A Place” is an archive documenting public art events by New York City abolitionist groups that opens space to engage in a collective reflection on the entangled praxis of placemaking as liberation. Spotlighting the pressing intersectional issues that communities face now, this project is envisioned as a toolkit, a future-making instrument to those rehearsing in solidarity.
Bio: Audrey Tseng de Melo Fischer (they/them) is a trans(queer) and bi(racial/national) architectural designer, writer, and researcher, whose work explores the interplay between heritage and futurism. Understanding them as sociopolitical constructs—one which catalyzes both destruction and reconstruction of built environments—they have meditated on the borders and binaries of these spaces. Currently working as a Senior Writer/Researcher at Adjaye Associates, Audrey have previously held positions as an architectural designer in renown international firms, such as SOM (New York), Shigeru Ban
Architects (Tokyo), Pelli Clarke & Partners (New York), among others. Their work has been published in Yale Paprika!, UCLA’s POOL , Storefront for Art and Architecture, and featured in places including Venice Biennale Architecttura and ACSA/EAAE. In 2021, they received the George Nelson Fellowship in 2021 for
their research on Stewarding Chinampas: Co-speculating Our Many Worlds (Mexico City).
Project: A play which examines how Africa and India’s complex cultural diffusion reveals relationships dating not just to medieval times, but digs deeper to antiquity. The synopsis of the play reads, “Two opposing empires seek control of a thriving seaport, in late medieval India. But when a polarizing royal edict is issued, tensions escalate, threatening to further divide the diverse populous. Unsettling truths are unearthed, as citizens are faced with questions of their origins and the decision to either submit to the clamor of conquest or commit to community-on their terms.”
Bio: Phillip Gregory Burke is a queer Black American of Haitian, Creole and Gullah-Geechee descent, artivist, actor, and playwright. His writing chronicles the sociology of the African Diaspora and illuminates the intricate intersections of Blackness and queerness. Plays: The Suncatchers of Sahel: An Ancestral Tale Told to Today’s Griot, Part I, (Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow Finalist, Princess Grace Award Playwriting Fellowship Semi-finalist), The Suncatchers of Sahel: An Ancestral Tale Told To Today’s Griot, Part II, (Semi-finalists-The Princess Grace Award Playwriting Fellowship, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival), The Simaraboo Two, A Holy Her (Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship Award Semi-finalist), Paradise Estate, (Fire This Time New Works Lab Finalist), A Mercy at Midnight Castle, He’s The First, (Inaugural winner Improbable Fiction Award Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival, top 13 Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival finalist, stream on All Arts/PBS), I’m The First!
He is a 2024 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Arts Fund grantee with his group DIEZ, National Black Theatre SOUL Series Cohort, Summer Jam Fellowship Inaugural Fellow. Memberships: Dramatists Guild, AEA, SAG-AFTRA, Latinx Playwrights Circle. Residencies: Theatre 4the People, The Civilians R&D Group, Roundabout Theatre Company. MA: Classical and Contemporary Text, Acting-Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. BFA: Drama & BS: Sociology-Syracuse University.
Project: An archive of the history of nail art as it exists cross-culturally amongst Black and Asian communities via document research and interviews with nail technicians & nail art appreciators. The information will be compiled into a final comprehensive presentation (i.e. zine, sculpture, object, documentary, performance) that demonstrates the research in an understandable archive for distribution to the public.
Bio: Myx Lee (they/he) is a Vietnamese and African-American sculptor and activist with their studio practice based in Bushwick NYC. Myx was born in the West Village, and raised all around NYC, mostly in the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Stapleton, and Harlem. In early 2020, they finished school and set their sight on a personal project that would encompass the roots of their identity and interests, and put forth a culmination of a cross cultural-historical study of Black and AAPI diasporas specifically within nail culture and the salon, with research centralized to New York City. Myx believes the nail, and its surrounding culture so succinctly captures dynamics between Black American and AAPI communities. Nails as a symbol of black and asian community; nails as solidarity; the history of chemical warfare in both communities; cross-cultural appreciation and anti-colonial beauty standards in studying the relationship between Asian American and Black communities. Myx graduated from SUNY Purchase as Chair of Public Art, with a BA in Sculpture. Myx has shown work recently at O’Flaherty’s, the Living Gallery, and has work on permanent
display in MoMA PS1.
Project: An examination of the relationships between Chinese Martial Arts and Hip Hop across past, present, and future timelines. The research will culminate in a multimedia exhibition and jam, in collaboration with cultural participants from both scenes and featuring breaking cyphers, battles, and Wing Tsun sparring.
Bio: Shannon Yu 余香儒(sha/shas) is a Lenapehoking(Brooklyn)-based artist from Taiwan. Sha holds an MFA in Performance and Performance Studies from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor’s Degree in Civil Engineering from National Taiwan University. Shannon identifies as a dancer-choreographer, multi-disciplinary artist, and queer creator. Sha practices Breaking, Hip Hop, Contemporary floorwork, Waving, Wing Tsun Martial Arts, along with videography and photography. Exploration of rapport has been the core of Shannon’s work, sha sees movement across bodies, images, videos and objects to create pathways. Playfulness and deep engagement is how Shannon likes to carry shas work forward. Shannon is the founder and Artistic Director of multimedia dance company SHA Creative Outlet. Sha has shown work at Ailey’s Studios, Arts On Site, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, Abrons Art Center, The Landmark Loew’s Theater, and has been awarded residencies with Dance in Bushwick, Chen Dance Center, New Dance Alliance, and The Center at West Park. Shannon has been in festivals such as Performance Mix Festival, the Evolution Festival, YES! Dance Festival, Your Moves Dance Festival, AAPI DAnce Festival at APAP, and WOW Festival. Shannon is named 2023 Asian American Arts Alliance’s Jadin Wong Fellow for Dance.
Project: A series of workshops for Indo- and Afro-Caribbean survivors of gender-based violence in NYC to share their survivor stories, heal in community, make art, and vision into new ways of being in solidarity as we build a world where gender-based violence no longer exists. The programming will culminate in a published zine filled with stories, art, and interviews from participants.
Bio: Priya Florence Dadlani (she/they) is an Indo-Caribbean cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY. Informed by the belief that art sparks culture shift and sustains revolution, Priya’s charge is to utilize the transformative powers of storytelling, community organizing, political education, & radical imagination to collectively disrupt the current world order and rebuild anew. Priya currently organizes with SPICY, a zine-making collective they founded in 2017 that works at the intersection of art, justice, and cultural archival. Through SPICY’s programming, they have partnered with Writers Club NY, Secret Riso Club, the Brooklyn Art Book Fair, New Women Space, NYC Feminist Zinefest, the New Museum, and the New York Public Library. In addition, they are utilizing strategic communications to support grassroots, youth-led, gender justice organizations at Third Wave Fund, and working to end gender-based violence in Indo-Caribbean communities across NYC as part of Jahajee Sisters’ Advisory Board.
Project: An archive of the history of nail art as it exists cross-culturally amongst Black and Asian communities via document research and interviews with nail technicians & nail art appreciators. The information will be compiled into a final comprehensive presentation (i.e. zine, sculpture, object, documentary, performance) that demonstrates the research in an understandable archive for distribution to the public.
Bio: Alexander Bondoc (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist of Philippine descent based in Queens, New York. Primarily focusing on concept nail art and the cross-cultural history of the nail salon, their practice aims to explore the act of queering the body, wherein subjects autonomously reshape the body by extending it through space in a non-linear fashion. Alexander’s work highlights the aptitude of the oppressed body to restructure & preserve itself despite a politically restrictive atmosphere. Alexander’s writing is featured in Liber Magazine, with nail art featured in editorial contexts in Flaunt Magazine, Office Magazine, Rebel Magazine, New York Magazine, and Madrid Fashion Week. They have a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Central Florida and currently work in social work as a Harm Reductionist to assist low-income and POC communities affected by the war on drugs.
Project: A music EP inviting Black and Asian musicians to work together on each track
Bio: Bryan Hahn is a video director, video producer, and owner of P.S. 4080, a creative agency that also acts as an independent music label. He has released over 5 music/visual projects which he oversaw distribution, artwork, videos, social roll out, A&R, contracts, events, and merch. Bryan has a background in music journalism for 10 years and transitioned into video production to pursue his passion for storytelling. He is also a member of the Asian American Collective where he acts as a content creator, event organizer, and mentor. In the last 2.5 years, Bryan has made it his mission to use whatever platform he has to spotlight Asian American creatives in front of and behind the camera.
Project: Our project explores nuances within English and Korean languages as a way to offer streams of connections within Black and Korean communities, through an anthology of letters that will be part biographical and part speculative fiction. By deepening our existing relationship in an artistic, political, and intellectually driven pursuit, our collaboration embodies a microcosm of solidarity work.
Note: Dana Davenport and Suhyun Choi are working together, as part of a collective.
Bio: Dana Davenport is a Korean and Black-American interdisciplinary artist raised in Seoul, South Korea, currently based between NYC and LA. Within her community-driven practice, she addresses the complexities that surround interminority racism as a foundation for envisioning her own and the collective futurity of Black and Asian peoples. In 2021, as part of her artist residency at Recess Art (Brooklyn, NY), she developed the ongoing project ‘Dana’s Beauty Supply’, an experimental pop-up beauty supply store that reimagines the beauty supply as a space for critical dialogue, collaboration, creativity, and community through Korean-language classes, cosmetics workshops, and a scholarship initiative.
Project: The Bridges Yuri Built is a biographical children’s book that follows the life of civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, whose participation in numerous anti-oppression movements established her legacy as both a practitioner and symbol of cross-racial solidarity, mutual aid, and community building. Written by Kochiyama’s great-granddaughter and acquired by Kaepernick Publishing, Bridges intends to educate young readers about a revolutionary political figure whose story highlights important interactions between Black and Asian communities in U.S. movement history.
Bio: Kai Naima Williams is a writer, poet, and performer based in New York City. She is the author of the chapbooks Tomorrow Maps and He Tried to Drown the Ocean, I Waved. Her writing has been featured in Mask Magazine, DRØME Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Stirring Lit, and CRWN Magazine amongst other publications, and she has performed in showcases Sakhi for South Asian Women and as part of the Freshman Class at Bowery Poetry. She is the 2018 winner of the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Fiction Award and the 2019 recipient of the Monroe Prize for Excellence in African-American studies, and she has been honored by the National YoungArts Foundation and The New York Times. She is also the co-founder and Executive Director of Eat At The Table Theatre Company, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing young actors of color with performance opportunities.
Project: Through interdisciplinary research methods, this activation space gathers stories of love and solidarity among global freedom struggles. It uplifts representations of diverse spiritual paths utilizing textile, collage, and video-based offerings honoring daily rituals of care, commitment, and recovery.
Bio: Lehna Huie is a multidisciplinary artist, mother and cultural worker of Jamaican heritage from NYC. Huie works in painting, installation and video on diaspora, memory and fragmentation - creating atmospheric portraits documenting her lineage.
Huie weaves multimedia patchworks expressing vignettes of self, familial ancestry and global Black history - while in dialogue with notions of liberation, migration and decolonization.
Concentrated on the soul, non-linear time and ritual, her works are composed of fabric, paper, projections, textile scraps and everyday objects. Her compositions integrate cultural symbols, treasured stories, and family photographs.
Lehna is an alum of Mount Royal’s Interdisciplinary Arts program at the Maryland Institute College of Art 21’. Lehna was named Artist Changemaker with Global Fund for Women and was an Inaugural resident of Stoneleaf Retreat Art Mamas Residency 22’.
Lehna had solo exhibitions at Gaddy Hamrick Art Center, Newhouse Center Contemporary Art, Clover’s and FluxFactory. She has participated in group shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, EubieBlake Jazz Cultural Center, Colored Girls Museum, Puffin Foundation and Raw Space and received awards including Space for Creative Black Imagination Research Fellowship and Joan Mitchell Center.
Project: A documentation of Black and Asian traditions of herbal healing, exploring how those practices can foster new forms of community care.
Bio: Louise Yeung strives to envision and build a better world as an urban planner and visual artist of the Hong Kong diaspora. Through printmaking and book arts, Louise explores migratory relationships between people, plants, and animals who transform new environments to call home. Louise’s place-based approach to her creative practice is informed heavily by her vocational work in climate justice policy and organizing as the Chief Climate Officer for the NYC Comptroller. She is a co-founder of Sunken Press 沉香出版, an art collaborative with Gloria Lau. Their most recent project, Industrial Chinatown, is a visual essay that traces the hidden manufacturing economies of NYC’s Chinatown neighborhoods. Louise is an Advisory Board member of the Octavia Project, which uses the creative power of speculative fiction, art, and science to engage femme and nonbinary teens in imagining greater possibilities for our future.
Project: The Poetic Pantry of Afro-Asian Solidarities will draw from models of mutual aid to include healthy and delicious food of and poetry and literature on the African Asian diaspora, resistance, and solidarities from poets and writers.
Bio: Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar and new media artist. Rhee’s debut poetry collection, “Love, Robot,” was published in 2017 and has been named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association.
As a new media artist, her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine is exhibited at the Electronic Literature Review Volume III and included in the anthology Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change (Routledge, 2022). From 2008 - 2018, with collaborators from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, she co-lead the participatory project From the Center which focused on digital storytelling, women of color, and HIV/AIDS education in the San Francisco Jail.
Rhee is an assistant professor at The New School in the School of Media Studies. Prior to The New School, Rhee held a faculty appointments at the University at Buffalo-SUNY, Harvard, and University of Oregon. Rhee earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in ethnic studies with a Designated Emphasis in new media studies, and her B.A. in Creative Writing/English from the University of Southern California.
Project: Sprung from an ongoing collaboration between Black Women Radicals (BWR) and the Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC), Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities: An Anthology is a groundbreaking collection that interrogates historical and contemporary Black and Asian American feminist cross-racial organizing, leadership, and perspectives.
Bio: Tiffany Diane Tso is a freelance multimedia journalist, writer-editor, organizer, and cultural producer based in Lenapehoking (New York City). Her work focuses on Asian American issues, Black-Asian solidarities, sex work, labor, advocacy, and art—all through a feminist lens—and has been published in platforms including Slate, HuffPost, Refinery29, Allure, and more. Some recent and ongoing collaborative writing and editing projects include the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities column on Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, a forthcoming Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities anthology for Haymarket Books, and e-book But I Am Here: Speeches, Writing and Art from the Sex Worker Movement in New York City. She is a cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC), a racial and gender justice group that engages in intersectional feminist politics grounded within our communities through political education, media-making, and public events.
Project: A large-scale hand woven and hand dyed textile work that looks at the history of coffee and tea ceremonies in East Africa and Asia, and highlights how these traditions contrast to Western and capitalist consumption of these drinks, and at a larger scale, human labor and time. This project will center and involve the communities identified by looking at our unique histories and cultures and exploring how our relationship with coffee and tea has evolved over time.
Bio: Malaika Temba is a Textile Artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Washington D.C. of Tanzanian heritage, Temba grew up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the U.S (MD, RI, NY). Temba’s lens and creative process are global, nourished by these experiences. Temba graduated with a BFA in Textiles from Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and is currently an adjunct professor there in the Textiles Department. In addition to her studio and teaching practice, Temba has worked at Pyer Moss, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and for contemporary artists including Jim Drain, Kenya (Robinson), and Anthony McCall. She has shown her work at Design Miami, the MET Gala, former Naval Base Fort Adams in Newport RI, and on the runway at New York Fashion Week. Select exhibitions include those at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, Allouche Gallery in New York, and Galerie Lilia Ben Salah in Paris, France. Her work is part of various public and private collections worldwide, including collections of Jorge M. Pérez at El Espacio 23, and Beth Rudin DeWoody at The Bunker Artspace. Temba is the 2021 recipient of the YoungArts Jorge M. Pérez Award.
Project: Our project explores nuances within English and Korean languages as a way to offer streams of connections within Black and Korean communities, through an anthology of letters that will be part biographical and part speculative fiction. By deepening our existing relationship in an artistic, political, and intellectually driven pursuit, our collaboration embodies a microcosm of solidarity work.
Note: Suhyun Choi and Dana Davenport are working together, as part of a collective.
Bio: Suhyun Choi is a Queerean artist and organizer. Growing up in different contexts built their understanding of the complexity of globalization, capitalism, and colonialism, in a macro and interpersonal way. They are particularly interested in QTBIPOC solidarity work. Their work in BUFU, a collective they are a co-founder of, has been covered by the Village Voice, NYLON, Hyperallergic, the Fader, and more. For BUFU’s programming, they have worked with the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, New Women Space, and the New Museum. They are currently doing a New Media Leadership program for Ford Foundation and are a Session artist for Recess Art.
Project: With the city moving people detained at Rikers Island to new jails in Harlem and Chinatown, my project will visualize and advocate for community-driven alternatives to these incarceration sites. This abolitionist reimagining aims to invigorate a grassroots movement that brings together Black and Asian communities to fight back against the proposed jails.
Bio: Sunnie Liu is an artist, researcher, and organizer whose work has been featured by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Yale Norfolk School of Art Residency, POV on PBS, Gidra, Prism Reports, and Foreign Policy. Sunnie graduated from Yale University with degrees in Studio Art and History. Born in rural China but raised in Houston as the child of Chinatown workers, Sunnie advocates for collective liberation through a community-centered practice. Sunnie currently organizes to protect Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side from gentrification and displacement. Previously, Sunnie fought for labor rights with Justice is Global and Mobilization for Justice, healthcare access with Southerners for Medicaid Expansion, and equitable housing with DesegregateCT. Sunnie is a co-founder of Xin Sheng Project, which won 2nd in the 2021 Gold Futures Challenge for its dedication to politicizing, combatting mis/disinformation, and sparking intergenerational conversation among the Chinese diaspora.
Project: Bring a Friend is a party, a multi-disciplinary performance space, and a community conversation, centering the politic that is queer friendship. BaF sits at the intersection of intimacy and joy, and intends to collaborate with a multitude of artists to build a fabric of solidaritous companionship in its process.
Bio: Anooj/mybodyasleep is a multidisciplinary artist and community organizer. He currently coordinates training and youth programming at Restorative Justice Initiative, and facilitates communities of practice centering every-day-transformative-justice-and-abolition, most recently at May Day Space and New York Public Libraries. He’s an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists and Fresh Lime Soda Productions, and is a storytelling teaching artist at the Moth and devised performance instructor at the School of The New York Times. theliminalab.com
Rohan Zhou-Lee, pronouns They/Siya/祂 (Tā) is a Queer/Non-Binary (gender Firebird) Black-Asian author, dancer, and organizer in New York City. Zhou-Lee is the founder of the Blasian March, an initiative to build solidarity between Black, Asian and Blasian communities through education and celebration.
Zhou-Lee is also a dancer, trumpeter, and writer of poetry, essays, and Afro-Asian fantasy.
Alisha (she/they/we) is a creative writer, poet and workshop facilitator from Brooklyn, NY. She’s passionate about music, Black femme joy, Black queer joy, and afrofuturism. Their work is in Catapult, Carve magazine, Teen Vogue, Allure, GQ and more platforms.
Most recently, Alisha won the Carve Magazine Poetry and Prose Prize of 2020 for her lyrical essay Fruit Snack Fairytale, judged by prolific essayist and poet Kendra Allen. Carve Magazine also nominated Alisha’s essay-poem for a Pushcart Prize. Fingers crossed.
As a workshop bae, Alisha curates loving and imaginative writing spaces for us to explore different realms within ourselves. The Words Between Us, Black Nightmare, Unraveling Our Inner Child, and The End…are some of the many spaces they created for Black people to play, heal and grow through words and world building.
Chanel Matsunami Govreau is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. They have exhibited at Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle, WA; SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA; Chashama, New York, NY; FLXST Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Holding House, Detroit, MI.
As an educator, Matsunami Govreau teaches photography and digital storytelling to young people who are recent immigrants to the United States. They are also the co-founder of Unblended, a workshop series celebrating Black and Asian intersectional friendships. They have given numerous artist talks at universities and colleges including Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK; Parsons School of Design, New York, NY; College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI; and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA.
Their work has appeared in the Observer, Bitch Magazine and Juxtapoze Online.
Matsunami Govreau received their BFA from UW-Madison in 2011 where they studied performance, printmaking and Asian American Studies.
feature writing about a Cleveland’s Asiatown during the height of the pandemic in spring of 2020 won the Fischer-Zernin Award for Local Journalism. She was also awarded the Joel Fleishman Distinguished Scholar Award for Highest Academic Achievement from the Sanford School of Public Policy (2021), the Diversity in Arts Leadership program from the Americans for the Arts (2019), the Oliver Koonz Prize in Human Rights Writing from Franklin Humanities Institute (2018) and the George Roby Art Award from Hawken School (2017). Hannah was born and raised in greater Cleveland, Ohio.