Asian American Biographies
Sabrina Margartia Alcantara-Tan
Sabrina Margartia Alcantara-Tan is a queer Filipina mestiza. She is editress of the zine Bamboo Girl (www.bamboogirl.com, under the auspices of Pinay Power Productions), which is by/ for/ but not exclusive to young loud women of color; it deals with issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia, much from the mixed-blood Filipina point of view. Her work has been published in Dragon Ladies: Asian Feminists Breathe Fire, that Takes Ovaries, and maganda magazine and her video work has been screened at the MIX Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. She studies Pananandata, the Filipino Martial Art of Weapon Fighting, and her favorite weapon is balisong. She is dedicated to what Filipinas, Asians, and Asian mutt women face on a daily basis, and works constantly to give those who stereotype her and other Asian women a very had time. She is an alumni of New York University.
Sawad Brooks
Sawad Brooks is a cultural and media critic, artist, and award winning designer working with public and information spaces. Sawad's work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Johannesburg Biennale and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. He is currently working with fellow artist Warren Sack on "hELLO7734 : Translation Map" a new network protocol art-research project which proposes a collaborative approach to translation. With a generous grant from Creative Capital Foundation, he is also developing a parasitic, animated architecture project. He has taught at Yale University; Merz Akademie, Stuttgart; Parsons School of Design, New York; and last year was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University's Department of Modern Culture and Media. He is a member of bbc art + architecture, a finalist in the World Trade Center Memorial Competition
Regie Cabico
Regie Cabico has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam and won the 1993 Nuyorican Grand Slam. He took top prizes in the 1993, 1994 & 1997 National Poetry Slams. He is the recipient of fellowships in Performance Art & Poetry from The New York Foundation for the Arts. He's been featured on the 2003 Humana Theater Festival. He is a 2004 New York company member of "Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind". His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry & Spoken Word Revolution. His latest solo work "straight out" is directed by reg e gaines.
Tina Chang
Tina Chang's collection, Half-Lit Houses, has already received positive reviews in Publisher's Weekly. Tina Chang's poems address the problems of family and heritage, in 40-plus lyrics that praise and address a mythical father while delving into the past: Hunan, China in the 1930's and 1940's. These are passionate and accessible poems, simple in diction and declaration, elegant in image and syntax. Of Half-Lit Houses, Li-Young Lee has said, "Tina Chang's poems perform the ancient tasks of remembrance, recovery, and praise. This work seeks to account for a life in the context of the myths, cultural and familial, that both nurture and threaten that very life and the voice that might sing it into legend. This is a poetry of amazing lushness, melancholy and affirmation."
Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee's first novel, Edinburgh, won the Lambda, the AAWW Lit Award, the Michener/Copernicus Prize and was one of Publisher's Weekly's Best Books of the Year. He is a winner of the Whiting Award and the NEA literary fellowship. His stories and essays are anthologized in Men On Men 2000, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, and TakeOut. He teaches writing at Wesleyan University, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Aric Chen
Aric Chen is a freelance architecture/design, decorative arts, art, and fashion writer in New York. He is currently a contributing editor for Surface, I.D., and Interior Design magazines, US correspondent for Interni (Italy), and was formerly a contributing editor for Dutch (Holland), as well as a reporter for the Intelligencer column of New York magazine. He has also contributed to: The New York Times, Art & Auction, GQ, Paper, Elle Décor, Azure, Dwell, ArtNews, House & Garden, Art on Paper, Black Book, Departures, Graphis, Jalouse, Metropolis, MIXT(E) (France), Print and others. He guest-edited the March/April 2003 issue of I.D. magazine and writes a monthly art column on the widely-read fashion website hintmag.com as well as a biweekly column for the recently-launched Architect's Newspaper. He is currently writing a book on the history of the Campbell's Soup Kids (Abrams) and is contributing to a book on the work of designer Vladimir Kagan (Pointed Leaf). In addition, he wrote an essay for the book American Dream: Houses at Sagaponac (Rizzoli), and is now working on essays for a contemporary drawing and photography exhibition catalog (ANP) and a book on T-shirts (Abrams). In 2003, he was the consulting design director for Sublime American Design, a store in New York's Tribeca neighborhood exclusively selling the work of American designers.
He is originally from Chicago, received a BA in architecture and BA in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MA in the history of decorative arts and design offered jointly by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Parsons School of Design. He has interned at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt, The Art Institute of Chicago, and Butterfields auction house. In addition, he has been a guest speaker at Parsons, the Cooper-Hewitt, University of the Arts (Philadelphia), Carnegie Mellon University, and Konstfack (Stockholm).