APAture 2025 Artist Bios

Performing Arts Showcase

Megan Lowe is a Chinese and Irish American dance maker, performer, teacher, singer-songwriter, and Artistic Director of Megan Lowe Dances. She creates powerful multidisciplinary dance works that transform spaces with dynamic place-making, playful partner-work, and daring aerial/vertical dance. She’s a two-time Izzie Award winner, with recent work presented at Legion of Honor, ODC, Fort Mason, and de Young, as well as in USAAF, SF Aerial Arts Festival, SF Trolley Dances, and on KQED Live.

Cristina Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, educator, and musician based in Oakland, CA. Born in England to a Filipina immigrant and a U.S. Navy officer, her work explores identity, belonging, impermanence, and the convergence of multiple cultural origins. Her current projects can be found cristinaedwards.com.

Raychel (she/her/any) is a Bay Area movement artist of Asian American mixed-race descent. Her creative world explores interconnectedness, identity, mental health, and community building. Her dance style is rooted in contemporary movement –drawing inspiration from street style forms. She holds a B.A. in Performing Arts & Social Justice and a B.A. in Psychology, from USFCA. She’s worked with the First Voice, dNaga Dance, Tracey Lindsay Chan, SanSan Kwan, and ODC's Pilot program.

Zoe Mueller (she/her) is a Chinese adoptee from Santa Fe, New Mexico. For her solo project on Natalie Junio-Thompson, she will probe at the often uncomfortable but necessary labor in rebuilding oneself. To attend to our own Jungian shadows, we must confront the unconscious, rejected, and repressed parts of us.

Noah Ramos is a dancer and artist based in San Francisco who grew up in Manila. Noah is fascinated with decolonizing mental health and well-being, and is passionate about challenging conventional Western medical understanding of what healing should look like. They strive to both tell stories through movement and explore the healing processes embedded in artistic creation and exchanging with others.

Renuka is a fat queer Indian American artist and community organizer born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a dancer, essayist, and poet, Renuka uses language — spoken and embodied — to face painful truths about the world we live in and sustain the difficult work of liberation. She is a company dancer in Duniya Dance & Drum Company and engages art as political storytelling most recently as part of Nava Dance's 2025 Unrehearsed Artist Residency Program.

Visual Arts Showcase

Eva Agus (b. 1978, Jakarta, Indonesia) is an Oakland-based multidisciplinary artist with a civil engineering background. Her work explores the intersections of science, memory, and cultural identity, blending technical precision with emotive storytelling using painting, textiles, and floral design. Her award-winning art has been featured in group exhibitions throughout California and beyond, as well as in permanent collections of Santa Clara County healthcare. She serves on the de Young Museum Flower Committee.

Theresa Calpotura is a multidisciplinary artist who has performed across the US and the Philippines. As a recording artist, she has produced three albums of her own work, including Musikang Halo-Halo: Starting to Mix — a musical storytelling project based on Filipinx folklore, her mixed heritage, and her grandmother’s life. In 2024, she participated in With A Twist: Stories of Her Own, which featured works made by Asian-American women based on retellings of folklore from their heritage.

Diana Yi-Yi Chen is a filmmaker, video editor, photographer, and emerging multidisciplinary artist. She was raised in Taiwan and resides in Berkeley, California. Having received her BA from the SFSU cinema program, her passions involve experimental films, which inspire her to explore arts through different mediums. Her works explore the theme of gender expectations of women.

Cristina Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, educator, and musician based in Oakland, CA. Born in England to a Filipina immigrant and a U.S. Navy officer, her work explores identity, belonging, impermanence, and the convergence of multiple cultural origins. Her current projects can be found at cristinaedwards.co.

Bushra Gill was born in Karachi and raised in Houston. She is an artist inspired by Islamic geometry and everyday life. Her BFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute informs a process-driven practice encompassing printmaking, collage, and glass, exploring themes of connection and identity. She has been awarded residencies at Pilchuck Glass School, Kala Art Institute, and Jen Tough Gallery. Based in northern California, Gill also curates, leveraging her teaching background to be a visual storyteller.

Thad Higa is a Korean-Okinawan American language worker. Thad works with artists' books, concrete poetry, printmaking, collage, typography, graphic design, and living rooms. He investigates the intersections of language, technology, capitalism, white supremacy, and their roles in controlling perceptions of reality, value, and legibility.

Susan Kitazawa is a lively 78-year-old woman living with increasing blindness and now a rare kind of cancer. Still dreaming, dancing, making art, writing, and being part of community, she hopes others can also keep going after whatever they love to do.

Isabel 玥 Li is a Kiwi artist, writer, and creativity researcher with roots in Kunming and Guangzhou. Their work invites joy and colour into themes of queerness, memory, and distance; their writing and illustrations can be found in Sine Theta, The Seventh Wave, and The New River. While primarily a digital illustrator and oil painter, they have recently been exploring comics and zines. Learn more about their work at isabel.li or @ilyues (everywhere).

Danielle Shi is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry who works to uplift Asian American worlds through autofiction and hybrid narratives. She creates in order to draw readers toward the resolution and catharsis the autobiographic form offers for specific audiences when met with models of identification and resemblance. Her novels The Shelter and Pandopticon have received support through funded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Prelinger Library, Winslow House Project, and PLAYA Summer Lake.

Jun Yan is a sculptor based in the San Francisco Bay Area who draws inspiration from his Buddhist background to create art that goes beyond the surface. His works focus on nature forms, expressing an internal strength. Using bronze, ceramic, and other materials, he sculpts a diverse range of subjects that embody a philosophy of stillness and connection among all natural forms of life.

Zhang Luochen is an undergraduate student majoring in oil painting at California College of the Arts. Born in Guangdong, China, Zhang recently held a solo exhibition in China and continues to pursue painting with a focus on personal expression and technique.

Yuting is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in figurative watercolor painting. Born and raised in Beijing, China, she moved to the U.S. in 2014 and became a full-time artist in 2023. Her work has been exhibited at respected venues like Mills Station Arts and Culture Center, Oakland Asian Art Center, Brea Gallery, and Pacific Art League. In 2025, she received honorable mention at the Women in Watercolor International Competition and held her first solo exhibition at Lindsay Dirkx Brown Gallery.

Film Showcase

Jalena Keane-Lee is a filmmaker who explores intergenerational trauma and healing through an intersectional lens. She was named a 2023 Adobe x Sundance Woman to Watch, and is the recipient of the Gotham Documentary Fellowship, Creative Culture woman filmmaker fellowship, Wyncote Fellowship and NeXt Doc Fellowship. Jalena is the winner of Tribeca Through Her Lens 2020 and DocPitch 2022. Her short films have streamed on POV and Criterion Collection, played at over 50 film festivals, and won best short at LA Asian Film Festival in 2020 and the Jury Award at Sundance in 2023. Jalena co-founded Breaktide Productions, an all-women-of-color production company that has won two Cannes Lion awards for branded content. Jalena’s first feature-length documentary STANDING ABOVE THE CLOUDS, which participated in the 2022 Sundance Edit and Story Lab, premiered at HotDocs in 2024 won the Bill Nemtin Award for Best Social Impact Documentary.

aka productions amplifies the voices of bipoc and queer artists through a focus on narrative, experimental and interactive film and media arts. We believe in telling these stories by the people and through the voices of whom these stories belong. Our work has screened at Cinéma Olympia Cannes, British Film Institute and over 40 international film festivals, art galleries and conferences. We focus on process over product to ensure high quality art and high quality human interaction.

Angelique Kalani Axelrode (they/she/ʻo ia) is a multimedia artist and founder of aka productions, a BIPOC and Gen Z centered production company. Their work has been showcased at over 40 film festivals, galleries and conferences worldwide, and they are currently pursuing their MA at NYU Tisch in Interactive Media Arts with anticipated graduation in 2025. With a background in community organizing and a degree in human development, Angelique is primarily concerned with how to indigenize and queer art/film creation processes. On a lifelong journey to embrace vulnerability, they see filmmaking as an intimate medium to connect, transform and heal.

Douglas Pa’ipa’iku Finnegan is an indigenous artist and tech strategist that combines his experiences in business and creative skillset to amplify the voices behind indigenous and queer stories. As a co-founder of aka productions, Douglas utilizes his professional background in the tech industry and academic background in human psychology to bring a strategic lens to their portfolio of work. His focus is not only on the art itself, but also the impact their art can have on their communities.

Joyce Keokham is a director, actor, and poet from Fremont, CA, currently based in Chinatown, New York. Their stories are often rooted in community and radical self-love. Joyce’s mom once described them as a "lover messenger." Joyce hopes to live up to this. Their directorial debut, WYA WYD (“Where You At? What You Doin?”), is a recipient of the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre. The pilot won the B Young and Spirit and Being awards from BRIC Arts Media’s Free Speech Award. Learn more about their work at lilearthling.xyz or on Instagram @fuqr.

Elaine Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American interdisciplinary artist exploring identity, displacement, and the search for home. She uses ephemeral materials and time-based mediums to capture the fluidity of memory and the passage of time, incorporating text to navigate vulnerability. Nguyen seeks to reconnect with her Vietnamese heritage, reclaiming symbols and creating community through shared experiences. She received an MFA from the University of California Davis, and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Sophia Perez is a Chamorro filmmaker working toward her PhD in Geography at UC Berkeley. With roots in the Mariana Islands and the Bay Area, she uses film to build bridges across cultural and political divides. She is an inaugural fellow of the Pasifika Entertainment Advancement Komiti’s Writing Program, a Pacific Islanders in Communications grant recipient, and a co-founder of several non-profit organizations in the Marianas including Our Common Wealth 670 and Fåha Digital Media.

Currently dwelling in Oakland - Huichin Ohlone territory. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Teao Sense is a visionary Turntablist / Multi-instumentalist / Producer / Educator + Founder of the cultural community artist collective- Audiopharmacy Prescriptions. As a budding filmaker, he aspires to make timeless films that invoke insight & inspiration.

Literary Arts Showcase

Nicola Andrews (ia/she/they) is a member of the Ngāti Pāoa iwi, and is of Māori and Pākehā descent. They currently work as the Open Education Librarian at the University of San Francisco, on Ramaytush Ohlone territory. OVERSEAS EXPERIENCE is their debut full-length poetry collection, published by Āporo Press.

Mahru Elahi is a queer Iranian American femme. They live in Oakland and have received support from Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers Retreat, Tin House, Hedgebrook, and VONA, among others.

Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American poet, writer, and educator whose work explores inherited trauma, language, and identity. Her work appears in Rising Phoenix, Anomaly, and more. She lives in Northern California and is working on her novel and poetry collection a new vocabulary, which was selected as a semifinalist for the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Additionally, her work was recognized as a strong semifinalist in the University of Wisconsin's poetry contest.

Ashley Sojin Kim’s poems appear or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Literary Matters, Gulf Coast, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and a BA from Johns Hopkins. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and fellowships from Kundiman and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

Linette Kingston is a Tamil Indian American writer focused on giving shape to the ever-present, permeating weight of the dissonant past, diasporic belonging, and the tendrils of imperialism. She grew up in Maryland and is an incoming epidemiology graduate student at UC Berkeley.

Grace Z. Li is a fiction writer from the Bay Area. She was a PEN America Emerging Voices fellow, and her work has been supported by the Tin House Workshop, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. She is also an arts journalist and critic. Her bylines appear in USA TODAY, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Grace is at work on her first novel and a collection of short stories.

stevie redwood is a disabled toisanese jewish neuroinsurgent introvert homotrash littledreamer bigmouth bitch living & dying in frisco. they’re unimpressed by scene queers, artifice, & pacifism. they’re fond of shittalk, porchsitting, leaflitter, & riffraff. they dream (of) a liberated palestine, maps without borders, and a different end of the world.

Danielle Shi is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry who works to uplift Asian American worlds through autofiction and hybrid narratives. She creates in order to draw readers toward the resolution and catharsis the autobiographic form offers for specific audiences when met with models of identification and resemblance. Her novels The Shelter and Pandopticon have received support through funded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Prelinger Library, Winslow House Project, and PLAYA Summer Lake.