CHINESE WHISPERS - Key Persons
Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and author of Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in many journals, and she has addressed academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers. She is currently writing a new book on art's public purpose.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Law, University
Bill Ong Hing is Professor of Law, University of San Francisco, and Professor Emeritus of Law and Asian American Studies at UC Davis. Throughout his career, Professor Hing has pursued social justice through a combination of community work, litigation, and scholarship. He is the author of numerous academic and practice-oriented publications on immigration policy and race relations, including Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy (Stanford University Press, 1993). Professor Hing has also written about his parents who were both detained at Angel Island upon entering the U.S. He serves on the National Advisory Council on the Asian American Justice Center in Washington, D.C.
Chinese Whispers:Bay Chronicles SM Videographer Chihiro Wimbush is an Oakland-based Documentary and Narrative Filmmaker. Chihiro is a 2012 Sundance Creative Producing Institute Fellow and a 2011 Bay Area Video Coalition Media Maker Fellow. He has worked on a wide range of projects around the world including baseball in Cambodia; AIDS orphans in South Africa; Dalits in India; godfathers of Asian American Jazz;and a conspiracy theorist's journey seeking truth across the United States. His work has been screened at numerous film festivals across North America and has been broadcast nationally on PBS.
Deborah Frieden is a cultural planning consultant assisting organizations and municipalities in planning for the creation of new museums, cultural centers, district initiatives or the re-envisioning of existing institutions. Her work is local as well as international and goes beyond the walls of the institutions and explores the contextual issues of cultural organizations in their specific communities, who they serve, and how their development will enhance their community. Currently, Deborah is assisting the Arts Commission with the Bayview Opera House project, SFAZZ with their new performing arts venue as well as working on projects in Vancouver, Canada, and Birmingham.
Project Associate Dorothy Mak is a bilingual native San Franciscan. She attended Mills College for business administration and studied visual design for print and web media at City College of San Francisco. She enjoys developing branding strategies, publication design, and bookbinding. For the past three years, Dorothy has worked with Rene on graphic design, media and project development for Chinese Whispers SM.
Project & Development Manager Evelyn Thorne is a community arts organizer, creative leader and conscientious facilitator. She has a master's degree in Arts Administration with a concentration in Community Arts Management from the University of Oregon and a BA in Creative Arts from San Jose State University. She is excited to be able to apply her passion for storytelling and arts-based civic engagement to work at Chinese Whispers SM. She enjoys listening to podcasts, planning the perfect weekend excursions, and coming up with top-notch puns.
Gary Noy, a Sierra Nevada native and current resident, has taught history at Sierra College from 1987 to the present. A graduate of UC Berkeley and CSU Sacramento, he is the founder and director of the Sierra College Center for Sierra Nevada Studies and Editor-in-Chief of the Sierra College Press. He is the author of Distant Horizon: Documents from the 19th Century American West (University of Nebraska, 1999). Gary is the co-editor, along with Rick Heide, of The Illuminated Landscape: A Sierra Nevada Anthology (Heyday, Santa Clara University, Sierra College Press, 2010). In 2006, the Oregon-California Trails Association (OCTA), a national historical society, selected Gary as "Educator of the Year."
James Kyung-Jin Lee is the Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine. A literary scholar, Jim is author of Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism, and sits on the editorial board of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. He received his Ph.D in English and M.A. in Asian American Studies at UCLA.
Sound designer, mixer and sound artist - Jeremiah Moore works with field recordings and signal processing to create works centered on human perceptions of time, the human/ nature/ technology interface, unearthing hidden beauty, and transformation of commercial culture into meaningless bliss. His work appears regularly in documentary films, permanent museum exhibits, art gallery installations, commercials and interactive projects. Jeremiah currently serves as co-chair of Bay Area Sound Ecology (BASE), organizing BASEbot listening salons, public soundwalks and other projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. He lives in San Francisco with his family including two boys who get far more sleep than he does.
Web developer Joel Chaidez hails from Southern California and moved to the Bay Area to surround himself with others also passionate about the potential of the Internet as a means to connect people. He previously worked in production management for web content providers. He is currently a graphic design and web programming student at City College of San Francisco.
Judy Yung is Professor Emerita of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught courses in Asian American studies, women's history, oral history, and mixed race. She is a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco Chinatown. Her publications include: Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, and Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present. She is a volunteer historical consultant to the Chinese Historical Society of America, and Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. She is the recipient of honors including the Association for Asian American Studies' Lifetime Achievement Award. She received her B.A. in English Literature and Chinese Language from San Francisco State University and her Master's in Library Science and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from University of California, Berkeley.
Project Associate Odelia So is a San Francisco native who takes pride in learning about her Chinese culture, heritage, and language. She graduated from San Francisco State University in visual communication design and has since assisted various agencies with projects in creative development. Odelia is now pursuing study in user experience design to create engaging interfaces and systems that are both efficient and satisfying to use.
Artistic and Executive Director - Rene Yung is an internationally exhibiting artist, designer, writer and cultural activist. Combining the poetic and the incisive, her transdisciplinary work connects community, culture, history, and place, to articulate the hidden and the overlooked. She specializes in civic engagement and heritage reclamation projects that help communities to address social and cultural issues in the local environment, by connecting people, history, and place to articulate the hidden and the overlooked. A native of Hong Kong, Rene thrives amidst cross-cultural dynamics and has worked with diverse global communities. She has exhibited at venues including TransCulture, part of the 46th Venice Biennale; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Yung has created extensive public projects for organizations including the Wing Luke Asian Museum, Seattle, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the City of Oakland Cultural Arts and Marketing Division. She was Artistic Director of City Beneath the City," an art installation featuring artifacts from the San José Market Street Chinatown excavation, in collaboration with the Stanford Archeology Center, History San José, Chinese Historical Cultural Project, and the San José Institute of Contemporary Art. A graduate of Stanford University, Rene has received grant awards including from the San Francisco Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the California Story Fund of the California Council on the Humanities.
GIS Consultant Rick Kos is a Digital Cartographer and independent consultant whose professional skills encompass many facets of urban and regional planning, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and education. He has served as GIS Manager for Design, Community & Environment, a Berkeley based design firm, and as GIS Planner/Analyst with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Currently. Currently, Richard holds a position at Worldlink, a non-profit organization. He is creating a software program designed to engage school-aged children about geography and global citizenship. Richard teaches GIS at San Jose State University and is co-author of GIS Tutorial for Economic Development. He holds a M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and B.A. in Environmental Planning and Urban Design from Rutgers University.
Roy Chan is an urban planner, educator, and arts administrator. Roy's two decades of professional practice and research have focused on enabling design and visualization technology as creative means for community development and community access to a shared cultural/spatial history. At the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, he developed a 3D virtual reality model of Manhattan Chinatown as an interactive portal into the Museum's archives. Roy is currently Co-Director of the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and Director of the Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project, a growing web and place-based digital archive.
Job Titles:
- Storytelling Performance Coach
Storytelling performance coach Tessa Koning-Martinez is a Bay Area based actor, director, dramaturg, and teaching artist. She says "In Chinese Whispers SM our intention is that the voice of the original teller is the one the audience gets to hear; whether it is someone who has never told their story in public, or an actor-proxy representing that person." She enjoys being an acting coach on Chinese Whispers SM productions to assist in this process, and for the opportunity to get to know a little more about the human family and the stories of elders.
Tony Fernandes is a technology expert with more than 20 years of experience specializing in Useability Design. Founder and CEO of UEgroup Incorporated, Tony previously also founded Netscape's User Experience Group, the Apple/Claris Human Interface Group and organizations at Lotus/IBM as well as Xerox PARC. He also launched various web and software ventures. Tony is the author of the book Global Interface Design.