Organization: Apex for Youth Ambassadors
Workshop 1: Branding, Asian-ness and Western Media
Workshop 2: Cultural Appropriation - Eastern and Western perspectives
Role: Curriculum development, Instructor

Debuting online Spring 2020 in response to Covid, Black Lives Matter and the rise of Anti-Asian Hate, the Apex for Youth Ambassadors (AYA) established their annual conference to facilitate a safe space for personal and collective reflection on their experiences as Asian youth through workshops and discussions.

We shared ways to engage with challenging emotions and situations, while grounding recent events historically and socio-culturally. I was glad to gather in the spirit of community with young people in that particular challenging cultural moment, to share my experiences as a Canadian-born Chinese female who lived in Asia for 9 years.

My workshop for AYA’s 2021 ‘InterASIANality’ conference, was entitled ‘Banana or Egg? Yellow or Golden? Asian-ness and Cultural Appropriation’.

Do you think it’s an act of admiration for non-Asians to have Asian tattoos, or people who cannot naturally have an afro or dreadlocks to wear these hairstyles? Should cultures from which American culture ‘borrows from’ just be glad that their culture is getting attention, even if it’s been white-washed or disrespected by being misrepresented?

In this education and discussion-based workshop, we’ll navigate the concept of InterASIANality by observing portrayals of Asian-ness using examples of cultural appropriation from American movies, music and fashion. The workshop will broadly discuss the portrayal of Asian-ness in American media, and Black-ness in Asian media. Our focus will center on better understanding when actions are genuine celebrations of cultural diversity, when they are ignorant and harmful, and how to navigate situations critically and diplomatically when the distinction isn’t so obvious.

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Other workshop facilitators: Asian Pacific American Center (APAC at the Smithsonian), Teens Helping Each Other (THEO), NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault (NYCAASA), Isabel An, and Skyler Chin.

Conference topics: HIV prevention, health equity, sexual health, allyship, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, fetishization and violence, arts activism, self empowerment and community, history and context of anti-Asian racism, myth of the model minority, storytelling and catharsis.

Organization: Genspace
Workshop: Color - Bacteria Dyeing and Extinction
Role: Curriculum development + Instructor
Co-Instructor: Aradhita Parasrampuria

Are the industrial realities behind pigments antithetical to their cultural meaning? Would you stop wearing your favorite color if you disagreed with the methods by which it was made? Are the colors and materials we use to depict the future in science fiction storytelling possible, given what we now know about their environmental impact?

In this workshop, participants will dive into the world of bacterial pigments and explore their integration into artwork through the dynamic techniques of block printing and silk screen printing. While thinking critically about their real world applications, we will cover the basics of how to select, grow and maintain the bacteria as your medium - and the challenges to the durability and life cycle of bacterially pigmented items.

Hands-on sessions will be contextualized within a framework that maps the industrial and cultural histories of color and textile dyeing alongside current speculative and realworld trends in the production and utilization of biopigments.

We will consider the science and sociopolitical forces driving industry at critical junctures leading to our current anti-fast-fashion climate. Our intention is to come away with an action each of us can do on our own, and that one person we know will adopt that brings us a little closer to a better fashion future.

Organization: Biodesign Challenge
Workshop: Future Fashion 2123 (Highschool)
Role: Curriculum development + Instructor

*** Workshop participants designed their own statement pieces (bucket hats), shared their views and walked the runway!

Do you think we’ll look back at the fashion of 2023 from the year 2123 the same way we now look at fashion in 1923? or will the gap feel even larger?

Join us for a 1-hour workshop as we take a quick tour of the history of fashion that led us to today and design the possible futures, where current sustainable and anti-fast fashion trends might take us.

We’ll survey the speculative worlds of science fiction stories and write our own narratives. We’ll debate if cyborgs are just the next step in human evolution, or if what we really need to be thinking about is biohacking and biocyborgs?

Will we be printing our wardrobes at home with biomaterials? Will we achieve the ultimate sustainable, regenerative material to product to end-of-life cycle? How will our relationship between the physical and digital world affect our fashion choices? Will your avatar be so much cooler than you could ever be that you won’t want anyone to know the real you?

How will our need to survive the environmental realities of the future dictate what we wear? Is your vision of the future of fashion, utopic or dystopic?

Organization: Genspace
Workshop: Protest Art - Science of Race, Sex, Health.
Role: Curriculum development + Instructor

The global COVID-19 pandemic has cast us deep into questions of how the science and politics of health affect our private and public lives. These times have impressed upon us how the science and politics of the body are a reflection of how we value our fellow humans near and far.

How do the scientific and medical gaze affect how we know, define, value and govern bodies as material and data? How do the politics of the individual to maintain a healthy body compare to the politics of nations to facilitate the achievement of healthy communities and populations? Do we all have a right to health? Who do we save first and why?
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Images: promotional images; workshop listing; still from VICE media’s segment ‘Autoinfected - The Frikis of Cuba’ - about the Cuban punk movement where members infect themselves with HIV so that they can live a better life in the sanitorium away from the harassment of the police; items from the MAGA Hat Collection by artist Kate Kretz.

2020 was the Biodesign Challenge’s 5th Anniversary, which I was excited to receive an invitation to be a judge for. It was inspiring to be in the company of so many creative and critical minds with a passion for thinking about the future of biotech, and present the award for the most Outstanding Presentation. Read about it in the latest Issues in Science and Technology.

Although it was sad to not be able to be together in real life at the MoMA and Parsons School of Design here in NYC where BDC is normally held, it made salient the urgency and importance of BDC’s mandate ever more prescient.

The Biodesign Challenge is: a nonprofit competition and education program that connects high school and university students with artists, designers, and biologists to critique, create, and envision the future of biotechnology. Students ideate and create designs that address topics in architecture, food, medicine, materials, fashion, and more. Each June, teams showcase their projects at the BDC Summit before a global audience, including 50 interdisciplinary judges who award the coveted Glass Microbe.

BDC’s vision is best described by Executive Director, Daniel Grushkin:

Society needs interdisciplinary thinkers to come up with the next solutions and to help understand their impacts. BDC bridges art, design, and biotech to develop the first generation of professionals who cross disciplines, anticipate promises and pitfalls, and engage the public in dialogue about the broader implications of emerging biotech.

To this end, BDC’s goals are threefold: 1) to create a community of collaboration among artists, designers, and biologists; 2) seed the first generation of biodesigners
; and 3) build meaningful public dialogue about biotech and its uses.

We invite you into our community, and hope you’ll join us in this journey.

Check out BDC’s publication, Biodesigned.

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Images: judges on zoom deliberating each category, BDC auction promotion images (BDC Grand Prize - the Glass Microbe, STING graphic silk scarf, OVAO style Amula Personalized DNA Necklace), Daniel Grushkin introducing me as I present the prize for the ‘Most Outstanding Presentation’.

Class: Biotech Fashion - Materials and Culture
School: South Brooklyn Community High School (Redhook, Brooklyn - New York)
Role: Curriculum development, Champion Instructor

This Spring 2022 class was part of a Biodesign Challenge X Pioneer Works initiative to bring science education to high schools underserved in the sciences.

Our goal was to inspire confidence in students with no science background to think critically and creatively about how each action in the production, consumption and enjoyment of fashion can be designed to be more sustainable, while aligning and expressing humanitarian values.

We covered the following topics and questions:

• trends in engineering and growing biomaterials

• materials - ethics, scalability, lifecycles and systems

• fashion as therapy + fashionable therapies

• fashion as protest

• fashion as identity and worldbuilding (cultural, self)

• politics of the body in fashion

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South Brooklyn Community High School (SBCHS) is a public transfer high school offering students who are truant or have dropped out a second chance to earn a high school diploma.

SBCHS is a partnership between the NYCDOE and Good Shepherd Services, a youth development, education and family service agency.

Workshop: E-waste Global Trade
Venue: Shanghai Expo 2010, Hong Kong Heritage Museum 2011
Program: Hong Kong Pavilion’s “Creative Ecologies - Business, Living, Creativity", a 6-month program organized by the Hong Kong Design Centre.


It seems that everything in our modern lifestyle is possible at the click of a button – it is hard to imagine a life without the conveniences of household appliances, mobile phones and personal computers. Yet, these wonderful, perfectly packaged machines that make our lives more enjoyable, inspiring and entertaining eventually end up in landfills. These technologies present a unique challenge to recycling and hazardous waste disposal. Join us in learning about e-waste and make your very own e-waste Superhero!

This workshop included a lecture that examined the world trade in electronic waste through: an overview of product and material origins and lifecycles, concepts such as planned obsolescence, documentary content and concluded by giving e-waste a second life as Superheroes!

Participants received booklets that included further reading featuring regional and foreign content such as the 2009 documentary ‘Heavy Metal’ by Jin Huaqing, Edward Burtynsky’s 2006 documentary ‘Manufactured Landscapes’, and links to the work of organizations such as the “Champions of environmental health and justice group” Basel Action Network (BAN).
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Images: e-waste recycling in Guiyu (China), map of possible routes of world trade in electronic waste, Nokia product evolution timeline, Ghana’s largest waste dump Agbogbloshie, posters from Shanghai Expo and Hong Kong Heritage Museum programme, participants in Shanghai, covers from recommended materials for additional research.

Venue: ‘The HIVE’ at Pomona College (Claremont, California)

‘Style as Social Unrest’ was a 2 part experience; a talk, followed by a workshop where groups designed graphics
for screen printed T-shirts by making collages from black and white photocopies of the 116 images from NASA’s 1977 time capsule aboard Voyager 1 and 2 known as The Golden Record.

The talk also addressed the pursuit of interdisciplinary creative careers in art and design.

While pursuing an Artistic Masters Thesis in bioethics and medical anthropology at New York University’s (NYU) Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, I was awarded a Global Research Initiative (GRI) Fellowship at Tel Aviv University, where I investigated contemporary attitudes towards genetics in Israel against the backdrop of the history of the Holocaust.

My purpose was to continue mapping the history and dynamics of the development of eugenic theory internationally between the United States, Germany and Israel to better understand: how the genocide of European Jews was committed in the name of medical innovation; how much this history plays a role in contemporary attitudes towards genetics and human experimentation; and how genetic theories are mobilized in social and cultural politics on issues of Jewish identity, trauma and memory (in particular, the field of epigenetics, the claim that trauma can be inherited).

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GRI Advisor: Nurit Kirsh (Head of Biological Thought at Open University of Israel, specializing in the history, philosophy and politics of human population genetics in Israel within a German context).

NYU Advisors: Rayna Rapp (Associate Chair of Anthropology, specializing in medical anthropology, gender and health, politics of reproduction; and disability in the US and Europe), Mitchell Joachim (Associate Professor of Practice, Co-Founder of Terreform ONE)

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Images (not my own - photography was not allowed): Yad Vashem, the ‘World Holocaust Remembrance Centre’ (Jerusalem, Israel). I visited the museum and library many times during the 5 week research trip.