apature 2007:
a window on the art of asian pacific americans

Featured artists

Participating artists:

Jason Agar began studying the Playback Theatre form 8 years ago in Eugene, Oregon. He studied at the International School of Playback Theatre in New York in 2001. In 2004 he traveled to the Philippines and assisted with the training of the emerging Manila Playback Theatre troupe. Moving back to the SF Bay Area, he was a part of the Bindlestiff Studio production of Stories High 8.5 and directed and produced the first round of the Pinoy Playback Theatre project in the fall of 2006. Jason is a bicycle and pedestrian safety instructor by day, working to build a better transportation system for now and the future.

Whereas traditional guitar-based singer/songwriter’s mythology centers around openness, earnestness and willingness to share an artistic utopia, Anamude 's take on the subject seems to hinge on a quietly voluptuous sense of inertia and absentmindedness. “[The music] doesn't so much reach out to the Other; it prefers to merely fascinate. Rather than communicating her confessional impulses, Anamude obliterates meaning, leaving only floating layers of almost-ambient texture" (Splendidzine.) Anamude is the musical project of Ana Hortillosa, Oakland-based artist who performs folk-pop arrangements with acoustic guitar and accompanied by friends on cello, accordion, and other instruments. Armed with three limited boutique label releases, Anamude is currently working on a new full-length recording project. http://myspace.com/anamude

Deb Aoki is a 3rd generation (sansei) Japanese/Okinawan-American gal who was born, raised, went to school, and eventually escaped Honolulu, Hawaii. She now lives in Emeryville/Oakland, California (a.k.a. "the mainland"). Since 1996, Deb's weekly comic strip Bento Box appears every Sunday in the The Honolulu Advertiser, Hawaii's largest daily newspaper. The latest Bento Box strips are featured on Deb's web site, http://www.debaoki.com and on the Advertiser web site at http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/current/il/bentobox. She also has two trade paperback collections of comic strips that are available from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and BessPress.com. Besides her comics and occasional fine art works, Deb reviews manga (Japanese comics) and writes manga-related news articles for About.com at her site, http://manga.about.com. She's also a content manager for eBay in San Jose. Deb has lived in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco and can probably tell you where to find plate lunch places in every one of those cities. Her favorites are the chicken katsu plate with extra chow fun from Grace's Inn and the Zippy's ZipPac.

Maile Arvin After proudly calling the Bay Area home for the last two years, Maile Arvin has just moved to San Diego to pursue a PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. She misses San Francisco already. Her work has been included in two Kearny Street Workshop chapbooks: Same Place, Same Time and 12 Ways: an anthology of the 2007 intergenerational writers lab . She blogs about her adventures in writing and the many places she calls home at: mailevine.blogspot.com.

Asiantics Improv is an up-and-coming long-form improv troupe that's based in the Bay Area. While they only recently came together in January 2007, many of them have worked together in the past as members of UC Berkeley's Theatre Rice! Asian American theatre group. Asiantics is a new word they created to describe their "Asian antics."

Neelanjana Banerjee  is a writer and editor living in San Francisco. She is the editor of YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia, where she helps young people produce their own media. On her spare time she is the managing editor of Hyphen magazine, co-editor of the forthcoming South Asian American poetry anthology Writing the Lines of Our Hands, and an editor for on-line magazine Digital Artifact. She recently completed her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University.

Mark Baugh-Sasaki was born and raised in San Francisco. Throughout his childhood he was exposed to nature and the natural environment—to the physical aspects by his father, and to the spiritual side by his mother—giving him a deeper understanding of our relationship with our environment.  He completed his undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his observations of the complicated relationship between the steel industry and Pittsburgh’s natural environment transformed his work, particularly in the development of his use of wood, steel, and cast metal. In his sculpture, he seeks only to describe the relationship between industry and nature; whether that relationship is good or bad is left to the viewer’s interpretations. www.industrialforest.com

New York City-born and bred technologist Glenda Bautista arrived in the Bay Area in 2003, on a road paved with pixels. She has been writing, designing, and developing Agendacide.com since 1998 and more recently launched a videoblog at glenda.wordpress.com. Her column "Bi-Coastal Disorder" also appears in the Chicago-based webzine Negative Waves. A product manager and ad systems architect by profession, Glenda has specialized in online media and search taxonomies for most of her career at companies such as news media titan McClatchy Company, online ad giant DoubleClick, and blog search start-up Technorati. As a writer, journalist and artist by education, her personal and professional mission is to fuse art and science through the creation of both media and technologies. Glenda is a current Co-Director of Locus Arts. She attributes her own cultural awareness as being cultivated through community activism experiences from her native East Coast. With past stints as Editor-in-Chief of the Filipino Intercollegiate Networking Dialogue (FIND) (in addition to Chair of FIND District 4), National President of Sigma Psi Zeta Sorority, and an officer of Liga Filipina at The University at Albany, she balanced managing station operations, producing, and DJing at her college radio station, WCDB Albany.

Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award winning poet, educator and literary events coordinator who now makes his home in Oakland, where he is the poetry editor for Tea Party magazine and lives with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes. To learn more about Oscar and his poetry, visit his website at www.oscarbermeo.com.

Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik is an artist and writer with a severe case of island fever. Although born and raised in Los Angeles, she has lived and worked on three continents and one archipelago. After graduating with a degree in Studio Art, cum laude, from Scripps College, she moved to San Francisco to co-kick-start Free Media Group, dedicated to Bay Area arts and culture. An active member of the 24hourshow collective of interdisciplinary Asian American women artists, she has exhibited work with KSW’s APAture 2005, MAPP: The Mission Arts Performance Project, and APICC and Kearny Street Workshop’s United States of Asian America Festival. Her writing appears in such publications as The Onion and TODO, where she is an editorial consultant. Sita has also been the product editor for Hyphen Magazine. She currently works at WIRED Magazine in San Francisco.

A Filipina poet born in San Fancisco, Arlene Biala has been honored to create work & perform with various artists, including Fancis Wong, John Carlos Perea, Masaru Koga, Lenora Lee, and her brothers Jimmy and Billy Biala. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, bone (helmut Press,1993) and continental drift (West End Press, 1999). Arlene earned her MFA in Poetics & Writing from New College of CA, recieved an artist residency at Montalvo, and has taught in the poetry performance workshops at CSU American Jazz Festival, KidArts’ POMO at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, La Peña Cultural Center, Writers’ Week at UC Riverside, And SomArts Cultural Center. Most recently she received funding from Poets & Writers, Inc. to perform for DiVerseCity poetry series in New York City.

Guitar was Brandon Bigelow’s love from the start, as was jazz and funk. From his early years as a part of a young group of jazz rebels in the early nineties that would meet in garages and karaoke dens, collaboration has always been key for Brandon. In 1995, he was forced to play the bass out of circumstance, but he grew into it and eventually found his place as a bassist for local ‘70s Funk supergroup Gyration Nation. He and fellow musicians from the group later collaborated in another Bay Area favorite in 1997, the R&B band Ethereality. As co-founder of Daly City-based Brown Eyes Productions, he has also produced and recorded a few local bands and spoken word artists. He recorded classic Filipino American bands Western States and Bobby Banduria, but his work with the legendary 8th Wonder introduced him to local laureate Golda Sargento. Their one-on-one 20 minute jams in the basement of the historic Bindlestiff Theater led to the formation of Golda Supernova, which is currently saving the universe from evil aliens by destroying them with DNA-shredding rock-and-roll. You can find Brandon at myspace.com/overtone.

Kate Blaine-Laterre is currently a freshman in college. She’s a bookworm, doodler, and a notorious film buff.

Nicole Bohn is a northern Wisconsin native who has lived in San Francisco since 1996.  She obtained her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco in 2002. Since obtaining her esteemed degree she has been published in several anthologies, including Exact Fare Only II:  Good, Bad and Ugly Rides on Public Transit, (©2003 Anvil Press), and Kearny Street Workshop’s own 12 Ways:  An Anthology of the 2007 Intergenerational Writers Lab.  Nicole likes to blur the boundaries in her work, advancing the politic of beauty and the body.

Narrative art led Esy Casey to study the work of Siqueiros in Guanajuato to Ghirlandaio in Italy, culminating in a BFA in Illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York. Upon graduating, Casey collaborated on a Fulbright-sponsored project in Spain to photographically illustrate and produce a book on soil erosion prevention that was distributed to farmers throughout Andalucia by the Institute of Sustainable Agriculture of Cordoba. Her design work has been featured in numerous publications for Bloomsbury USA/UK, Walkers Books, Henry Hold and Company, and the Amnesty International Firefly Project. She is currently the Co-Producer/Director of Photography for the feature-length documentary Thing with No Name (wwwthingwithnoname.org), a film following two HIV positive Zulu women in South African, and continues to freelance illustration, design, and photography.

Catrina Chaos was born Brown in Manila, Philippines and grew up in the Bay Area. She works in many different mediums, including 35mm film, video, mixed-media, and digital art. Her artwork is informed by hip-hop, punk rock, do-it-yourself and street art. She was awarded a Queer Asian & Pacific Islander Pride Scholarship in 2003 and her short video, Every Surface, was shown at the National Queer Arts Festival in 2004. As a lifelong social justice activist, Catrina is proud of her ethnic culture of revolution.

Odessa Chen attracted international attention with her debut record, One Room Palace. Since then, she has toured internationally, been interviewed on NPR, MTV Chi and Pacific Fusion TV, and been heard in numerous independent films and compilations, as well as on television and radio stations. She has played everywhere, from dive bars and warehouses to The Great American Music Hall. Sharing stages with Damien Jurado, Mark Eitzel (American Music Club), Mia Doi Todd, Jolie Holland, and Vienna Teng, she also appears on releases by Thee More Shallows, Charles Atlas, and Dineh (singing in Finnish). She was a member of Thee More Shallows from 2004­-2005 and Troia (SF Weekly Music Award) from 1995-1999. She has studied classical voice and cello and sung in various early classical music choirs, but is a self-taught guitarist. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.

Jennifer Chien was born and raised in San Francisco. She holds a BA in American Studies from Smith College and MA in Creative Inquiry/Interdisciplinary Performance from New College of California. She is delighted to be returning to the writing life after a decade-long hiatus.  Her poem “(An Improvisation)” was recently published in The Los Angeles Review.  She is a dance and theater artist, currently performing with the ESP Project, in residence at Intersection for the Arts.  In addition to writing and performing, she practices massage therapy (karunahealingarts.com), and is a devoted guardian to her two dogs, Bruno and Lula.

Iu-Hui Chua studied at UC Irvine’s dance department, later graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a Race and Ethnic Relations Sociology degree. She has performed in the San Francisco Butoh Festival and as a company member with Anna Halprin, Salt Farm, Labayan Dance, and Theaterworks. Her own work has been presented at ODC’s Summerfest, the National Asian American Dance Performances Festival, KSW’s APAture, Mills College, Bare Bones Butoh, San Francisco Art Institute, and Yugen Presents. Her belief in the importance of bringing free and interactive performance to the San Francisco community has engaged her in performing site-specific works throughout the city. Her work is highly influenced by training with Anna Halprin, Karen Williamson, Akira Kasai, Ledoh, Enrico Labayen, Alonzo King and Robert Moses. She is co-founder and co-director of the performance group Nature Theater of Oklahoma as well as founder and artistic director of the Raw Egg Collective.

Jaime Cortez is a SF Bay Area writer, visual artist, and cultural worker. His short stories have appeared in over a dozen anthologies, and he has edited numerous publications. Jaime was the program manager at Galería de la Raza, a consultant for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and is a recent graduate of the UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts program.  His first collection ofshort stories is slated for early 2009 from Suspect Thoughts Press.

Bay Area artist Ali Dadgar works with experimental printmaking, digital photography, painting and performance. Using a variety of processes, his work examines, reflects on/and transforms how meaning, function and value are created. Born in Iran, Dadgar immigrated to the United States in 1978. A member of the Berkeley-based theatre company Darvag since 1988, Dadgar collaborates with a wide range of visual and performing artists.

Lee Daugherty is a very complicated skateboarder who lives in a complicated city that's full of complicated people and things. Everyday he skates the city in which he lives.

For over eleven years, Tony Dijamco has made a name for himself on the national comedy scene by blending his extensive and explosive stage presence with his one of a kind, sardonic sense or humor. And don't let that "boy next door" facade fool you, either. Time and time again, he has proven that no subject is too personal and no topic is beyond approach. And neither Tony nor his fans would have it any other way.

Irene Faye Duller received her M.A. degree in Asian American Studies/ Ethnic Studies, with foci in contemporary women artists, critical artistry and cultural theory. As a cultural educator with Kularts and Yerba Buena's YAW program, she has experience with education
programming, critical pedagogy, cultural specificities, and fostering community empowerment through creative arts and curriculum building. A community/political arts and street culture cognoscente, Irene is a founding member of 8th wonder (2000), the nation's premiere Pilipina/o performance poetry collective. She has traveled to Los Angeles,
Seattle, Chicago, Ohio, Texas, New York and the Philippines to perform. Irene also proudly reps The Rhapsodistas, an all female experimental hip hop space and has performed sold out shows in San Francisco venues such as MILK, Club 6, and Elbo Room. She is also an
organizer with babae, a Filipino women's organization whose campaigns include violence against women and human rights violations in the Philippines.

Oakland's Dreamdate's Yea-Ming and Anna met when Anna tried out for bass in Yea-Ming's old band Hawaiian Getaway.  When this band fell apart, Yea-Ming and Anna continued to hang out and play music together, discovering that they were musical/songwriting soulmates. In the world of the future, Dreamdate first came about in early 2005 when Emily the original Dreamdate drummer posted a Myspace comment on Yea-Ming and Anna's page about starting an all-girl Beatles cover band; at a previous party, they had bonded over their love of the Beatles and their condemnation of those who didn't share that love. Though an all-girl Beatles cover band would probably have been a lot of fun, so was an all girl original rock band!  and so at Yea-Ming's suggestion, Dreamdate had their first practice, at which their first single "The One I Need" was completed. When Emily moved away to Seattle, Dreamdate continued to play with fill-in drummers but toured with Emily for their Record Release Tour in March 2007 for their debut full-length album "Come Over Now."  After this tour, Yea-Ming and Anna recruited Elbert Chang of the famous Clarendon Hills to be their drummer. They have been happy ever since!

Jenny Eng was born in San Francisco, California in 1970 and grew up bussing between Mission District schools and bakeries and Chinatown's Chinese schools and sewing factories. She received a B.A. in Architecture in 1994 from U.C. Berkeley. She works as a designer by day in order to support an increasingly expensive and out-of-control art habit. Jenny Eng lives and works in Oakland, California.

Poaching from the blues, jazz, folk ballads, stomps, bluegrass and hollars, Aireene Espiritu and Rick Di Dia pick, strum, stomp, slide and sing their own brand of stripped down Americana. By taking pieces of the past; your story, my story, our ancestor's stories, they paint pictures of places and people's lives, the day-to-days, little stories from different times and cobble them together to make the old sound new in an old sort of way.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Amber Field grew up with her adoptive Caucasian mother and Taiwanese sister in Korea, Nepal, Liberia, and the United States. She studied tabla and esraj (classical Indian music) in Shantiniketan, India, from 2002-2004, as well as didgeridoo, arabic tambourine, and djembe. Afterwards, she moved to Korea and started two world fusion projects that toured throughout the country. Amber returned to her home base of San Francisco in September 2006 and currently teaches as well as performs with various project. The consummate multi-instrumentalist and traveler, she weaves together Indian, Arabian, African, Latin, rock, trance, classical, jazz, folk, gypsy, and aboriginal sounds into one big beautiful tapestry. Her music reflects that the whole world is her home, and most importantly, home is in her heart. Amber fully believes that we can all be the change we want to see in the world, and that love is the supreme healing energy.

John Fong of The Sake Bombers collective is made up of eleven Bay Area based Asian American artists.  The group consists of freelance filmmakers, editors, animators, screenwriters, film theorists, musicians, and film lovers. 

Yasmine Gomez is co-director and screenwriter for Consumed, winner of Best Film for the 2007 San Francisco 48-Hour Film Project by team Subject to Change Productions. She has directed and produced local film projects, as well as premiered her short film Look Both Ways at KSW’s APAture 2006. Yasmine currently works as a producer for Eveo, an interactive video and 3D animation design firm.

Julia Graham is a newcomer to the San Francisco Bay Area after spending eight years in New York City studying, performing and teaching dance. Her interests have always been in body-oriented practices including but not limited to dance and yoga. Julia received her BA in Dance Education from Hunter College in 2004. From 2004 -2006 she attended Sarah Lawrence College where she received her MFA in Dance. Julia recently has performed her work “Fan Dansu” in Translations: Dancing the Intersection between Gender, Race, and Sexuality” at Counterpulse.

Mayumi Hamanaka, originally from Japan, is a photography and installation artist. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA in Humanity/ Art History from International  Christian University in Tokyo. She is the recipient of the Murphy Fellowship Award, Taipei Artist Village Fellowship, and others. Her work has been shown in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery; SFMOMA Artists Gallery; Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago; and Asian American Art Center, New York. She taught at California College of the Arts in Oakland and will be teaching at Diablo Valley College in Fall 2007.

Amy M. Ho works mainly with video installation and performance. She is particularly interested in using art as a medium to investigate the relationships between action, space and experience. Amy Ho graduated with a degree in the Practice of Art from the University of California Berkeley and is currently experimenting in the Bay Area.

Lina Hoshino is a filmmaker and new media designer whose films, including the award winning Story of Margo, In God's House: Asian American Lesbian and Gay Families in the Church and Caught in Between: What to Call Home in Times of War, screened internationally in many film festivals. As a co-founder of Many Threads and Tactile Pictures, Lina has led creative and design efforts for many community organizations. Her mother is from Taiwan and her father is from Japan. Lina was born in the U.S. and grew up in the U.S., Japan, and France. She studied painting and sculpture at Carnegie Mellon University.

Vanessa Huang is a queer first-generation Chinese-American poet, writer, filmmaker, and community organizer born in 1984 in Berkeley to immigrants from Taipei. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and, since 2006, Oakland. Her short films include eternal rhythms (2002), Resisting Violence, Building Community (2005), and pray ting ai fly (2007), which recently premiered in the 2007 Queer Women of Color Film Festival. She is currently editing a short film written and directed by Rui Bing Zheng and writing and producing a two-woman show with Melissa Koh.

Jing and Mark have been making their print zine punkpunk since 2001. It premiered at KSW’s 2001 APAture of all places. They both love sharing and making things. Currently their obsessions include: Hairy Houdini, hamster escape artist; Gustave, the gentleman crocodile; and Seirei no Moribito (aka Guardian of the Sacred Spirit). Jing hails from SF and Mark from the most isolated island chain in the world.

Korina M. Jocson was born in Santiago, Philippines, and moved to Los Angeles after the assassination of polictial leader Benigno Aquino. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Stanford University. Her publications, including essays, poems, and articles, have appeared in various literary magazines and scholarly journals. She lives in Oakland, CA.

Seanne Kempis is an outgoing, fun, weird, and silly person. From an early age she developed interests in photography and video and is excited to be able to share her stories through various forms of art.

Lucien Kubo is a Sansei (third generation Japanese American) who grew up in the Bay Area.  Her parents were interned during WWII at Topaz, Utah.  She attended SF State and became involved in both the SF and LA Japanese/Asian American communities.  Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, she helped mobilize for communities affected by redevelopment, Redress & Reparations (internment), and an unjust and racist war (Vietnam).  Her art reflects personal parts of her life experience but also strives to understand the “human condition.”

Susanna Kwan uses ink and paper to tell stories. She collects from around the corner and across the planet, in cities and in deserts.  Her work stems from observations of the tension and grace that can be found in any human relationship. She is a native of San Francisco.

Mike Lai was born in Hong Kong in 1980 and came to the United States as a student in 1993.  He received his BA from Davidson College in North Carolina and his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. He now lives and works in San Francisco.

Dhaya Lakshminarayanan -- pronounced "Dye-yah" not "De-hiya" as Americans might think--
has a roti-colored complexion and blends Eastern and Western values into a bicultural lassi. (Warning: she turns into Goddess Kali if ever hungry).  She has degrees from the prestigious institute for nerds, MIT. In past incarnations she excelled as a management consultant, venture capitalist, a researcher in Cuba, and a journalist at the Democratic National Convention.  Why leave "good job" to do comedy? Only Lord Balaji will know! Currently she is working in the Funny Business World, with her commanding 5-foot stage presence and material from her traditional Indian upbringing, inner nerd, Alabama roots and political activism..  Sometimes she jokes about her Gays (with so many, how will she ever meet a husband?) If there is one Desi girl you should arrange yourself to (this year) this is the one.  (If suitable match, email worriedparents@ourdaughtermakeschaitea.com).

Deborah Lee is program director of the PANA Institute (Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific Asian North American Religion) at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and coordinator of the Civil Liberty and Faith project. She is a minister in the United Church of Christ.

A former editor for Indiana Review, Esther Lee’s poems and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, Ploughshares, Cream City Review, Salt Hill, Good Foot, Swink, Runes, New Orleans Review, Hyphen Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Columbia Poetry Review, Passages North, Alligator Juniper, Puerto del Sol, Diner, LitRag, Folio, Faultline, Caketrain, Dislocate, Sonora Review, Five Fingers Review, and Born Magazine. She’s been awarded the 2004 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize; nominated for a 2004 and 2006 Pushcart Prize, Ruth Lilly Fellowship; and her manuscript, Little Lung Damage, was selected as a “Discovery”/The Nation Award semi finalist and finalist for the Pleiades Press Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and Prairie Schooner Prize. Her chapbook, The Blank Missives, is forthcoming from Trafficker Press. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing and Consciousness Program at New College of California and serves as the Senior Editor for Tea Party Magazine.

Jeffrey Lei is a Bay Area comedian and the director of the short film "Take-Out" and "Dick Ho: Asian Male Porn Star". His rise to obscurity began when he abandoned his struggles in engineering school to pursue a film degree at San Francisco State University. Jeffrey has directed two independent films and acted in others and can be seen telling bad jokes at your local coffee house. His acting credits include a very small miniscule role alongside Maggie Cheung in the Hong Kong flick "Sausalito".

A Boston native, Edwin Li has been a working comedian since the age of 16.  Performing producing and hosting various comedy show in the Bay Area, Edwin’s comedy addresses issues ranging from dating to race, from education to finance. An avid fan and dedicated student of comedy from a young age, Edwin’s comedy incorporates his own life experiences relating to family, education, and culture. Although always eager for a laugh, like most comedians, Edwin can be surprisingly serious and contemplative, actively searching for new words and new language to express new experiences and new perspectives in his comedy.

Stephanie Lie was born in San Diego, California in 1977 and lives in San Francisco. She received two Bachelors degrees in Art and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Lie has been an artist in residence at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in France and at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Lie worked with sculptor Jane Rosen as a studio assistant for five years, where she assisted in the fabrication of works, including at the Pilchuck School of Glass. During this time she was also a teaching assistant of drawing classes at UC Berkeley. With Rosen, she developed drawing workshops, which are now in their third year. Lie is designing an instructional drawing book with Rosen and Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes. She has also collaborated with performing artists as a musician and as a developer of multimedia tools for live performance.

Philippe Van Lieu is a comic artist who grew up between San Bruno and Daly City. He has wanted to do comics ever since he was a little kid, but he was only able to do something about it relatively recently. He’s currently a Senior at SFSU, but he really doesn't like school; he’s going through it just to use his degree as seed money for future comic projects. His mom came from South Korea, while his dad is White (the Van Lieu name is of a Flemish-Dutch lineage); this mix of a Eastern and Western background continues to influence his art style and belief system.

Claire Light works in nonprofit development and writes fiction. She co-founded and was a senior editor and development director at Hyphen magazine. Previously, she worked as program manager at Kearny Street Workshop and curator at The Lab, served on the advisory committee of The Mission Movie Project, co-founded the Digital Horizon program, and volunteered at Hapa Issues Forum and a number of other organizations.She currently serves on the Board of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting writers of color who work with speculative genres,and is a contributing editor at Other Magazine. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University, and her writing is published in McSweeney's, Farthing, and a forthcoming issue of The Encyclopedia Project, as well as a number of blogs. She has taught writing at SFSU, Kearny Street Workshop, and San Francisco's School of the Arts.

Lucy Kalyani Lin is a visual artist.  She has been a successful pescetarian gemini for one full year. Brussel sprouts will save your life. You just don’t know how to cook them. 

Niana Liu began drawing circles as soon as she was old enough to hold a pencil. But external factors gradually choked off the waters of creativity and imagination, leaving the art-seed within her parched and dormant. Years later, as an adult, she woke up to find herself descending into a soul-numbing corporate career, and the realization brought her back to her senses. Four years ago, she put her business school diploma aside and bought her first paintbrush and SLR camera, and the art-seed was watered once again. She has lived happily ever since. Mixing influences from her Chinese roots with her experience living in Europe and the United States, she often focus on the interplay between cultures in her artwork. Her hope is that through the universal native language of art, she can reach out across the boundaries of culture and country to share her experiences and perspective. More information: www.NianaLiu.com

Michael Lopez is senior at Jefferson High School. He is an active videomaker and musician. With video, Michael wants to contribute to thoughtful dialogue on social and community issues and through music, Michael likes to express his artistic impressions of life.

Lumaya's music is powerful, driving, and infectious. They deliver a unique, refreshing sound that is simultaneously ethereal and aggressive. Lumaya's songs are marked by lead singer Olga Salamanca's haunting and forceful vocals. Whether she is singing a soft bluesy lilt or an angry brooding plea, her dynamic voice commands attention. Lumaya has played at landmark San Francisco venues such as the Great American Music Hall and they continue to captivate audiences throughout the Bay Area.

Juliana Ma is a junior at Vassar College, majoring in Chinese and minoring in Economics. She plans to study in Shanghai in Fall 2007. Painting since she was thirteen, she has previously studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She will work with whatever materials she can get her hands on, but she mostly enjoys painting with oil paint. Lately, she has also been trying her hand at gouache. Since she began painting, her subjects have been broad and plentiful, but over the past years her work has narrowed in on Asian American culture. She is most fascinated by the complex and internally conflicting nature of the Chinese American lifestyle, particularly for females like herself.

Minette Lee Mangahas was born in Hawai'i and raised in Hong Kong and the Philippines. After completing a degree in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, she moved to California and began studying with eminent East Asian calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi, becoming his apprentice and assistant for seven years. She applies the ancient philosophy and techniques of calligraphic painting to creating multi-media works that explore personal journeys and reflections on contemporary urban life.

Mari Naomi is the author and illustrator of Estrus Comics. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Comics Journal, Not My Small Diary, Pet Noir and Action Girl. She has been exhibiting her artwork since 2002 and has exhibited and done live painting in such venues as the DeYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Varnish Fine Arts, and the 111 Minna Gallery. She works and lives in San Francisco, California.

Mary Anne Mohanraj received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah, specializing in post-colonial literature and creative writing.   She is the author of several books, including her dissertation book, Bodies In Motion (HarperCollins 2005), an exploration of sexuality, marriage, and Sri Lankan/American immigrant concerns; the collection of stories was a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards.  Mohanraj has recently received an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in Prose, a Neff fellowship in English, a Steffenson-Canon fellowship in the Humanities, and the Scowcroft Prize for Fiction.

Amal Mongia is an amateur photographer raised in New Delhi, India before moving to Southern California at the age of nine. He has been living in the Bay Area for five years. Amal is a member of the Bay Area photography collective, Community Images. He has been trying his hand at photography for a couple of years. Being resourceful and sometimes broke, he works with cameras found at garage sales and thrift stores. His aim with photography is to use it as a tool for social justice and to tell stories of people living on the margins.       

Maria Nakae is the Alliance Building Coordinator and a New Voices Fellow at Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ). Her work at ACRJ focuses on building alliances, conducting trainings, and developing tools and resources to advance the reproductive justice movement. Prior to joining ACRJ, Maria worked with community- and school-based programs to increase access to reproductive health services for youth in immigrant communities and communities of color. She holds a BA in Psychology from New York University and a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley.

Kirthi Nath is an award-winning South Asian filmmaker, writer, educator and curator. As an artist, her body of inspired creative work fluidly straddles genres, occupying a fertile hybrid landscape of cultural poetics, experimentalism, and hybrid narrative. Tactile and dreamlike, her work explores female subjectivity, memory, desire, and racial and sexual identities. Nath’s films have shown in several festivals and events including a solo show at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,Moondance International Women's Festival, San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, Berkeley Women of Color Festival and Ladyfest (Olympia, Scotland, Bay Area and Texas). As an educator, Kirthi teaches video at the Bay Area Video Coalition to marginalized youth communities and is constantly exploring multiple ways of empowering young people to become both producer and audience; to understand genre and go beyond it. Kirthi’s curatorial work reflects her interest in promoting women, people of color, youth and queer perspectives. Also an active member in the art community, Kirthi has appeared on several panels, been guest juror for film festivals.

Nooshin Navidi made her first trip to Iran in Spring 2006 to explore the country for sixth months. Like most Americans, she had viewed a highly politicized Iran through the lens of mainstream media. But she knew there was much more to Iran, especially its vast young population. Fortunate to earn the trust of a few students and professors while in front of a video camera, the filming of YOUNG REPUBLIC (JOMHURI JAVAN) finally began. Born in Southern California to an Iranian father and Korean mother, Nooshin graduated from Stanford University with a Masters in Sociology and Bachelor in Communications. Her connection to documentary film grew deeply as she witnessed its power to raise people's consciousness of social, cultural and geopolitical issues. Nooshin participated in student film workshops and made a short documentary film titled Represent, which covered a controversial student election when a Caucasian male ran unopposed and was elected as president of Stanford's Asian American Student Association (AASA). Nooshin currently works at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), a media-arts organization based in San Francisco. She is editing other short documentary films related to Iran, so stay tuned!

Ben Needham continues his exploration of identity through the use of oil paint, personal photography, and appropriated imagery. The results are painted collages that reflect themes of childhood, lost heritage, and perceptions of Asian culture. These recent paintings contain the representations of lived and fictional experiences as well as the conscious awareness of a multi-cultural existence. Within the painted surface, real memories mix with the fictive to create a new narrative space.

Katherine Ng is a survivor of the suburbs with an affinity for puns and all things pun-related. She has a propensity to break into sporadic monologues and is know for her hyperactive imagination and love for people watching and inserting dialogue into the mouths of innocent passersby.

Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen received her MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College, where she was awarded the Mary Merrit Henry Prize in Poetry and the Ardella Mills Literary Composition Prize in Creative Non-Fiction. Her work has been published in the Asian Pacific American Journal, There Journal, Nha Magazine, and the Vietnamese Artists Collective anthology AS IS: A Collection of Visual and Literary Works by Vietnamese American Artists. Anh-Hoa has performed her work at Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture 8, San Francisco’s Litcrawl and Writers with Drinks. In addition to writing, Anh-Hoa creates self-published and hand-bound artists books and is a photographer, printmaker and performer. Anh-Hoa's artists books and her photography series “Of the Body” have been shown in "Piecing Together: Emerging Vietnamese Women Artists" at the Asian Resource Gallery, “(re)collect: Visions and Sounds” at Oaklandish, and in the “Cheers to Muses” exhibit at the Chinese Culture Center. Anh-Hoa has also completed a residency at Hedgebrook, a Writers-in-Residence Program for women. She is the founder of Pomelo Press and lives and creates in Oakland, where she was featured as www.iloveoakland.com’s Artist of the Month.

Brian Nguyen is a visual artist who works primarily in illustration and character/concept design. He has a penchant for bold imagery and aims to convey a sense of energy and/or movement in his work. Brian grew up in Silicon Valley and is a graduate of UCLA.

noa- is based in the Bay Area, and has been hosting and live painting at a freestyle showcase at the ShoeBiz Adidas concept store every fourth Saturday of the month. Paint clothing and shoes - try to put the art in your life.

Directed by 21-year old phenom Danilo Parra, who is currently working on a video for Bjork, "Kill the Lights," is a video from Odessa Chen's new CD The Ballad of Paper Ships. The video features Odessa Chen and Spencer Cunningham, with lighting by Keith Pikus and additional filming by David Luraschi.

Han Pham is a storyteller who loves the grace and humor of overlooked moments.  She has been featured on the radio and in publications including Hyphen Magazine, Nguoi Viet, the academic anthology, Encounters, and As Is, a collection of Vietnamese American art and writing. Active as an artist and performer in the California arts community, Han is a member of  Bindlestiff Theatre, the Vietnamese performance ensemble Club O'Noodles, the San Francisco-based Vietnamese Artist Collective (http://www.vacollective.org) and  the site-specific art group 24Hour Show featuring Asian American artists spanning dance, performance, spoken word, photography and visual art (http://twentyfourhourshow.com/).  Catch her at sendtohan (at) yahoo.com.

Hang Phan is a young female artist, born in Ninh Thuan province, in the central part of Vietnam. At three years of age, she could draw complete paintings that her kindergarten teachers still keep. When she was six, she joined the adult level art class because the province did not have any art classes for children. At the age of nine, she received some children’s awards, and in 1996, she passed entrance examinations into the Fine Art University. During her student years, her work was featured at group exhibitions in Saigon, and she sold several paintings. After graduating from the Fine Art University in June 2001, she worked in Saigon until January 2003 as a design teacher for the Vietnam Jewelry Institute. In April 2003, Hang arrived in America, where she has continued to create and sell her paintings.

Vong Phrommala (Co-choreographer with Jessie Bie) was born in Laos.  In 1982, at the age of ten, he and his family relocated to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  Later, he attended Oberlin College and North Carolina School of the Arts, where he studied ballet and modern dance. In 1993, he moved to San Francisco and has since worked with Colleen MuVihil, Remy Charlip, Stephen Pelton, STEAMROLLER, and Margaret Jenkins.  After receiving a scholarship to participate in a performance workshop in 1994, he soon joined the Joe Goode Performance Group, San Francisco's premiere modern theater group that works collaboratively with its members to create evening-length works incorporating spoken text, movement and song. During his time with the company, Vong has taught and performed in Egypt, Jordan, Brazil, and throughout the United States.  During a brief sabbatical in New York, he met David White through a Fresh Tracks audition, who later asked him to participate in the Mekong Project. In March of 2001, Vong traveled back to Thailand and Laos for the first time in 20 years to speak with artists, to collect stories, to remember, and to be inspired.

Pinoy Playback Theatre was formed in the fall of 2006 honor stories from the Filipino American Community.  In Playback Theatre, stories are told, actors are cast into roles, and the story is acted out improvisationally in a way to reflect back the essence of the telling.  It’s not just about comedy, although that often happens during a show.  Originally created in 1975 by Jonathan Fox in New York, this theater form is used in over 60 countries worldwide.  Troupe members are: Jason Agar, Chris Baytan, Laurie Buenafe Krsmanovic, Joyce Lu, Dominique Nisperos and Nicole Villanueva.  

Ron Quesada/Kulintronica is the fusion of kulintang with electronica. Maguindanao, Maranao, and Tao Sug rhythms fuse with modern dance rhythms to create music for the 21st century Filipino. Created just outside of San Francisco (nasa bundok) by a second generation Filipino-American, Kulintronica bridges the generational gap between the ancestors from the archipelago and their living descendants spread across the globe.

Bushra Rehman’s mother says Bushra was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure. Since there are no definitive records of the time of her birth, there is no real way of knowing, but it would explain a few things. Bushra is a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a Greyhound ticket and a book bag full of poems. Her poems have been collected in the chapbook Marianna’s Beauty Salon and she is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Bushra has been featured in The New York Times, New York Newsday, and on BBC Radio 4. Her work has appeared in ColorLines, Mizna, Curve, SAMAR, Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality; and Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies. To read excerpts of her work, visit www.bushrarehman.com.

Margaret Rhee hails from Los Angeles and now resides in San Francisco, where she writes poetry, essays, stories, and paints on bodies. She is a Kundiman fellow whose publications include entries in Amerasia Journal and her most recently published essay, "Chink,' 'Chinaman,' and 'Celestial': Inhumanity in Crash," in an anthology published by Speak Out--Institute for Democratic Education and Culture.  Currently, she is working on a fantastically wrenching thesis and making a short film on heart throb Asian American drag kings. She is also a proud member of JSO (Just Speaking Out), a queer women of color artists collective.  

The Rising Asterisk consists of Bay Area natives (Remshot, D.Fusion, Tantrum, & DJ Psani) who carry an "asterisk" in their moniker to show the listeners that they are bringing new meaning to the idea of being a music-making American. The conscious hip hop crew is proud of their Filipino American and Asian American roots but hope to remind their audience that we are defining our generation with our everyday actions. The "asterisk" represents defining the undefined within our communities. Members of the Rising Asterisk are also well known in the Bay Area's battle circuits. Tantrum is a local freestyle battle champion who has amassed several titles over the last few years. Remshot has established himself as an up-and-coming producer by making an impression at local beat battles and winning a title in only his second appearance. The group's most recent album, The Five Point Theory EP, was independently released by the Berkeley based label Grow Records. This album is a showcase of production and lyrical skill that the group has developed since its conception in 2002.

As an actor, Jose Flipchild Saenz has worked with the hereandnow theater company, Bindlestiff Studio, Kul-Arts, Asian American Theater Company, and the Drama Mamas.  His film credits include the Black Eyed Peas’ music video for "Bebot" (gen 1) and the 2001 Sundance Film Festival official selection The Flip Side.  As a poet, he was a finalist in the 2000 FPACCC poetry slam, a member of the SONS poetry/performance collective, and appears on the album L.A Enkanto: In Our Blood--Pilipn@ Spoken Word from Los Angeles.  He is a member of the  ap groups Fakshuns and Western Union MC's. He is also a playwright, director, and standup comedian. His work this year includes The Bakla Show at Bindlestiff, Pagbabalik with Aimee Suzara at La Pena, Cowboy vs. Samurai with Asian American Theater Company, and the lead in Low Hanging Fruit, by the Drama Mamas, which was featured at the SF Fringe Festival.

Adrien Salazar is a poet prophet magician currently residing in Berkeley, California, and attempting to navigate the suffocating space of the University. Originally born in Kalibo, Aklan, Pilipinas–a place and history from which he was dispossessed--Adrien has been involved with Maganda Magazine for three years, having published a spoken word piece, “Speak” in its nineteenth issue, Crisis. He wrote Trainsong, a play produced as part of Bindlestiff Studio’s Stories High 2006 Showcase. He continues to write and live poetry.

Shizue Seigel is a writer, designer and artist whose work explores the intersection of collective and personal history. She is the author of In Good Conscience (2006, AACP, Inc.) and is working on a new book, Children of Manzanar, to be published by Heyday Books. Her prose, poetry and artwork have been published in Cheers for Muses and other anthologies.

Ben Seto is a Chinese-American artist who was born in Oakland and has been living in the Bay Area his entire life. He loves art and draws to enrich his life. His absolute favorite thing to do with his art is to tell stories in a comic book format. Aside from taking a few art classes in high school/community college, he is mostly a self-taught artist. He is constantly trying to improve his skills in illustration, painting and sculpting and trying all these disciplines together to tell a story, trying to utilize his artistic skill to try to tell the best stories that he can tell.

Pallavi Sharma was born and raised in India and immigrated to the United States in 1997. As a child, she was encouraged to create and appreciate art by her artist family. She received her BFA and MFA in Art History from the Faculty of Fine Arts Baroda, and her PhD from India’s National Museum Institute of History of Art and Conservation. Her formal training in art history, combined with visual and performing arts experience has shaped the interdisciplinary nature of her art expression. Her hopes and dreams as an artist include embracing people through her artwork, which suffered alienation in the early years of her immigration. She is member of American Pen Women, the American Council of South Asian Art, and Easy Writers group. At present she is serving as Vice Chair of the Arts Advisory Committee of the City of San Ramon, California.

Alexander Shen is a California resident, born and raised.  He has spent the last 15 years of his life illustrating and comicking for the sheer love of it.  His work has been published and affiliated with such companies and publications as Comcast Spotlight, Play Jam Inc., Wild Snake Games, Hyphen Magazine and Renkoo.

Eve Shen is always discovering new ways to create art and give back to her community. Born in Taiwan, she moved to San Francisco in 1998 from New York City, where she received her BFA in Graphic Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Eve loves to paint, sculpt ceramics, and draw. She has consistently taken classes in many fields of art to challenge herself as an artist. She is inspired by the nature around her, the limitless imaginations of youth and anything that stimulates her soul.

Jocelyn Shu currently lives in Daly City and enjoys residing in perpetual fog. She spends much time pondering upon the values of art-making and her existence in this world. In 2005, she received a BFA in Painting and Drawing through a joint program with the University of San Francisco and the California College of the Arts. Her studies included a year abroad at the Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy.

Joti Singh has been dancing bhangra all her life.  In 2006, she wrote her Master’s thesis on bhangra in the South Asian Studies program at UC Berkeley. Joti is also a student, teacher and choreographer of West African dance and has traveled twice to Guinea where she studied with master dancer Moustapha Bangoura, and members of Les Ballets Africains. She recently received a grant from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts as an apprentice to master dancer Alseny Soumah. Joti has performed extensively, including a concert with Ricardo Lemvo and Makina Loca at Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley, the opening of “The Edge of Desire” art exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, and the 2006 Carnaval Parade in San Francisco.

Recently completing a master in fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts, Robin Sukhadia has been studing tabla (classical South Asian drums) under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri at CalArts and the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California for the past six years. His special focus on the musical traditions and rhythms of South Asia informs his approach to musical arrangement and composition on a wide range of concert, film and album productions. For the past four years, Robin has traveled internationally on behalf of Project Ahimsa, an organization committed to empowering impoverished youth through music education. In 2005, Robin arranged and produced a concert in partnership with Carnegie Hall’s Global Encounters series to bring world class North Indian Classical musicians to high school students across all NYC boroughs. Robin’s writings on music education and the creative process have appeared in Hyphen Magazine, the Subcontinental, and Saathee Magazine

Currently, Talia Waldsmith coordinates the day-to-day operations of Exhale's programs which include the nation's first nonjudgmental post-abortion talkline, regional trainings for health care providers, and Exhale's bilingual abortion zine. Prior to joining Exhale, Talia served as administrative staff for the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network and as Associate Clinic Manager at the Women's Community Clinic in San Francisco. She is currently getting her Masters in Women's Spirituality at New College of California.

Charlene Tan lives and works in San Francisco bay area. Currently a 2009 BA candidate for Urban Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, she is directly involved with local non-profits in the art community such as Southern Exposure and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Also an artist, Tan has shown at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, Blank Space Gallery in Oakland, WORKS in San Jose, Intersection for the Arts, and Triple Base Gallery. Her work is in a constant need to explore through the view of anthropology, ecology, biology, and psychology. Ranging from organic patterns to performance work. Tan’s installation of “Phobias” at APAture 2007 is a further exploration of a book of “Phobias” originally created for “Terror?” for Intersection of the Arts. Her work plays with the human scale of architecture and its emotional impact on our lives.  Having known phobias in clear view, readily available to open a dialogue on subjects never discussed with strangers, and with the ephemeral twist in that the work is a gift so that the viewer can own one’s fear, have a reference to a phobia, or give it to someone they care for. 

Truong Tran is poet and visual artist who received his undergraduate education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his MFA at San Francisco State University. He is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the Arts Council of Santa Clara, the California Arts Council, the Creative Work Fund and The San Francisco Arts Commission. His poems have been published in numerous literary journals including ZYZZYVA, The American Voice, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine) and The North Dakota Quarterly. He is the author of three collections of poetry including Placing The Accents, The Book of Perceptions and dust and concscience, which recently received the Poetry Center Book Award. Truong is currently living in San Francisco and teaching poetry at San Francisco State University, Mills College, and elsewhere.

Tapan Trivedi grew up in India. When he was 22, he came to America. Besides blondes and redheads, he discovered standup comedy. At the insistence of his friends, he went up on stage at the celebrated Houston Laff Stop open mic, where he killed his first time on stage. Addicted to laughter, he kept plugging on till he was a finalist in the Funniest Person in Houston Competition. Since then, he has performed with comedians like Dave Attell, Tom Rhodes, Bobby Slayton, Debbie Gutierrez, and Lahna Turner. Constantly on the road winning audiences with his brilliant writing and hiliarious observations of life in the USA as an East Indian immigrant, he still finds time for television commercials, radio performances and brief movie appearances. He recently wrapped up a movie for the Howard Stern Film Festival. Sacramento News and Review calls him “one of the best comedians in California – period,” and Jeffrey Callison of NPR says, “This cat made me laugh out more than ANY guest ever has!”  Tapan has since gained notoriety for his racial observations and ultra geeky one liners, and his catch phrase, “I can't understand America,” is gaining popularity by the day!

Katy Tsai is currently a fourth year at the University of California, Berkeley studying Art Practice with a minor in Computer Science.  Painting has always been one of his many passions and is one of the main reasons he decided to pursue art.  However, his current explorations seek to combine his two fields of study by finding an intersection between the art world and the digital world.

Sabrina Tsang, aka DJ Similak Chyld, is known for moving dancefloors from San Francisco to New York and Japan with her unique fusion of hip-hop, soul, reggae, breaks and Latin music. Determined to please the crowd with her smooth mixing and dope musical selections, Similak Chyld can be found rocking the turntables at clubs, bars, private parties, openings, and restaurants. She honed her turntable skills on the SF Bay Area party circuit before hooking up with the international crews at FTC Skate and Future Primitive Sound, where Similak has been the in-house DJ at exhibit openings and video release parties for artists such as Doze Green, The Barnstormers, and Mike Giant. Similak Chyld has played alongside such renowned artists as Wu Tang Clan, Jurassic 5, Z-Trip, Radar, Mix Master Mike, Little Louie Vega, David Harness, Goldie, Disco D, UFO!, the Triple Threat DJs (Apollo, Shortkut & Vinroc), Rob Swift, Lyrics Born, Joyo Velarde, P.E.A.C.E (Freestyle Fellowship), Faust and Shortee, JBoogie's Dubtronic Science, Blue Sirkut (Karl Denson's Tiny Universe), Jedi (Digable Planets), the 4oneFunk DJs, Oakland Faders (Scion Mixtape Winners), RedWine DJs, and Romanowski.

Scott Tsuchitani is a San Francisco-based artist who believes in a socially engaged practice of art grounded in lived experience. He has earned two advanced degrees in engineering and worked for seven years in the medical device industry before changing careers to community-based documentary filmmaking, and more recently to visual art. Tsuchitani’s art, which ranges from tactical intervention to oil painting to new media installation, has shown in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. He has also lectured widely on his art at SF State, Santa Clara University, and UC Berkeley, where he will guest lecture again this fall.

Elsa Valmidiano has been a volunteer after-abortion counselor since July 2006. She has also served as a contributing writer to Exhale’s bilingual abortion zine, Our Truths-Nuestras Verdades. Elsa continues to volunteer for various feminist and pro-choice organizations throughout the Bay Area such as Planned Parenthood Golden Gate, ACCESS, and the GABRIELA Network. She holds a BA in Literature from UC San Diego and a law degree from Syracuse University.

Melanie Veloria spent her college years learning about the evolution of bipedal locomotion and hominid brain size. Upon graduation, she decided that she did not want to go to Africa and dig square holes and instead packed up and moved to the equally wild and dangerous Los Angeles, CA. It was there that she discovered her love for making film. After living and working in Hollywood for a few years she came to the conclusion that people from the Bay are not cut out for LA life and decided to sell out and get a staff job at a Bay Area media company, where she met and started collaborating with a group of talented and passionate people, who have helped her execute some of her most fulfilling work to date.

Diem Vo is an aspiring filmmaker and junior at Balboa High School. She is interested in making films that have a positive impact on the community. At the Dinner Table was her first piece produced with the help of BAVC’s YouthLink.

Saba Waheed is part of the editorial collective of SAMAR Magazine. Her short film When They Started Bombing has screened at the Women of Color Film & Video Festival, the Arab Film Festival, and around the country. She works as a community researcher by day.

Wilson Wong has been playing guitar for three and half years, writing songs for two years, and writing songs he'll actually play for two months.  He's performed at open mics at Manilatown, Locusarts, the Hayward Bistro, Paddy's Cafe, and various living rooms.  He has been making no-budget digital shorts for a few years now.  His first short, Bookstore Girl (2003) won Best Overall at the 2003 Ohlone College Short Film and Video Festival.  He was a 2006 APAture artist for his documentary, Like Mother, Like Son (2006) and recently part of Locusarts Short Film Night with Father to Be (2006). He and fellow East Bayer, John Fernandez, formed Eccentrik Skeptik Productions in 2003 and are developing upcoming projects

Lawrence Yang was born in Chicago, Illinois and has been drawing since he was a small child.  Since much of his extended family is in Taiwan, he has made it a point to visit every year or other year, and this has directly influenced his artwork.  Growing up in a flat, ocean-less area for his entire life, he was eager to move on after college.  In 2006, he packed up and moved out to the Bay Area and hasn’t looked back – the mountains and ocean, as well as the art and culture have been a perfect fit for him.  Working Asian influences and urban art into his artwork, he has found a perfect balance of expression and exploration.  Lawrence works as an experience architect for interactive media by day, and paints by night.

Debbie Yee is an attorney and poet, and serves on several nonprofit boards, including AAWAA and ZYZZYVA.  In 2007 she was a selected Kundiman Fellow for Asian American poetry.  Debbie's poems appear or are forthcoming in anthologies and literary reviews, including 12 Ways (Kearny Street Workshop Press), Cheers to Muses, Barn Owl Review and Shampoo.  She is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and Boalt Hall School of Law.  Visit www.debbieyee.com.

Annie Yu was born and raised in San Francisco.  She has been writing the zine Nonsensical for six years and also enjoys writing poetry and making collage art.  Check out her online shop at http://curbsidetreasure.etsy.com

As a fourth generation American, Isabell Zevair was born in multicultural Los Angeles County, the oldest of six.  She moved and traveled a lot, and was the chronic new kid on Someone Else's block. Her father’s side is Korean via Hawaii; her mom’s side is Chinese, primarily based in Maryland and Washington DC. Her cousins are part Japanese or Euro-Anglo-Caucasian, with all their respective identity crises. She likes to joke that for many of us, to varying degrees, art is religion OR religion is art. It's all a part of the heart of being Human. Zeviar has resided in the Bay Area for three years, and currently works with the Bay Area Models Guild, which also helps explore the unity and diversity of local art scenes, while she continues to cherish the creative process. 

Full time firefighter/paramedic, full time comedian Mark Zhang started doing stand up comedy because it gave him a way to express what it’s like to grow up Chinese-American. For Zhang, one of the best ways to break cultural barriers is through the universal language of Laughter. If different people can laugh together, then we should have no problems accepting each other. Also, as an Asian male who gets so many unfair stereotypes, he truly believes that every time he goes up on stage, he can melt some of that away.  Stereotyping will continue only as long as we allow it!

DJ Zita Have you ever peeped a fly sister smashing classic records all night long with shine, authority and pure flair?  Don't trip, that baddest mamma jamma is Bay Area veteran lady DJ Zita, who brings her unforgettable mix of versatility and femininity to the turntables every time she puts needle to vinyl.  Her sound spans the eras and blends genres of body-rockin' music; she'll seamlessly segue from boombox classic hip hop to mothership trunk funk, spin smooth R&B treats along with timeless soul heroines and heroes, flip reggae dancehall riddims, throwback to '80s pop freestyle, all the while rocking a gardenia in her hair and grooving like Prince made that jam especially for her to dance to…and you too will have no choice but move if MamaZita's on the decks.  Since 2000, the incomparable DJ Zita has shocked dancefloors from Honolulu to New York to Sactown, the Bay Area and back down to LA and San Diego. She has been putting it down for hip hop, artistry, and sisterhood, and she continues to grace the game and the wheels of steel with her golden touch. Visit www.djzita.com