Invited Guests
flo oy wong
Flo Oy Wong, co-founder of AAWAA, an artist/poet/educator, began her art career at the age of 40, her poetry career at the age of 75. A recipient of 3 National Endowment for the Arts Awards, she published “Dreaming of Glistening Pomelos,” in 2018 to celebrate her 80th birthday.
Ray Beldner
Ray Beldner is the Co-Founder and Director of stARTup art fair and has worked in art education and marketing for the last 20 years with the goal of inspiring people to create, value, and support the visual arts. As an artist, he has exhibited in more than 15 solo shows and over 100 group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally.
Akemi Chan-Imai
Akemi Chan-Imai is the Programs Manager at Oakland Asian Cultural Center. Her focus is to develop more culturally relevant programs and help expand OACC’s presence as a community resource and activity hub in Oakland. She is a Certified Nonprofit Professional with experience in nonprofit management, programs, and operations, particularly in startup environments.
Cecilia Chia
Cecilia Chia is the founder and director of Glass Rice, a contemporary art gallery in San Francisco. She was born and raised in the Outer Richmond and has a deep love for her community. After having had moved to Beijing in her second half of high-school and later on to New York for college, she returned to the Bay Area with a strong drive to uplift, inspire, and bring people together in her community through art.
TIFFANY YAU
Content & Editorial manager at Gray Area and Curator at The Galallery (The Secret Alley)
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Ph.D. is both a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist who creates installations that blur the line between ethnography and art in order to convey experiences of extraordinary nature and address issues of social justice. Her latest work, Atlas of Dreams, unveils the invisible presence of dreams in the urban context. She has received awards for her work from the Wing Luke Memorial Museum of Art, Saint John’s University, and the Ministry of Culture of Chile. She has been an artist in residence at California State University at Chico, de Young Museum of Art, the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts, and Djerassi Artist Program.
MIN YOON
Min Yoon is a butoh dancer, ritual performance artist, and an ArtCorps Scholar at the Tamalpa Institute, researching methods of collective choreography and conflict resolution using the body. Butoh is an expressive mode of dance that seeks to find what is deep within, beyond what is socially accepted in a pursuit of new expressions of truth. dancetotheedge.com