People
Steering Committee
Julie Cho, is a graphic designer and educator. She is partner in a 3-person, design practice called Omnivore, based in Brooklyn/Portland/Los Angeles and founded in 2002. Over the past 20 years, they have worked on a wide range of projects always anchored by a strong collaborative approach. They have been recognized by the AIGA, Type Director’s Club and the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography and are in the permanent collection of the Department of Architecture and Design at The Art Institute of Chicago. Independently, Julie has been Assistant Professor in graphic design at Otis College of Art and Design in the undergraduate/graduate departments. In 2017 she co-founded Thick Press (see Thick Press on Instagram), with Erin Segal, social worker and social work academic. Thick Press is a publishing practice making and distributing unusual books at the intersection of care and movement. Julie received a BA in history/sociology from Columbia University with a minor in visual arts. She received her MFA in graphic design from Yale University School of Art.
Cathi Choi, is the Director of Policy and Organizing for Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of activists mobilizing to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure feminist leadership in peacebuilding. She co-coordinates the Korea Peace Now! Grassroots Network, launched in 2019 to organize communities in calling for demilitarization and lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Policy History and the Asian Pacific American Law Journal. She obtained a JD from Harvard Law School. Previously, she worked at a civil rights law firm in Los Angeles, and clerked for Judge Denny Chin on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Prior to attending law school, she completed the Dual Degree International History Program at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and obtained her BA from Columbia University.
Naree Kaeis a creative in the product and branding space. She works as an advocate for accessibility in tech, overseeing projects that help fix technical a11y issues and implementing a11y best practices. Outside of her product role, she helps build brands for BIPOC communities. Some of the brands she helped develop through design are: Asian American Research Center at Stanford, Asian American Art Initiative | Cantor Arts Center, Las Fotos, Black Hour LA, Google for Nonprofits, and Sip & Sonderto name a few. Naree is passionate about using her skills in design to uplift communities and bring awareness to topics such as climate change, social justice, and education. She is currently on the steering committee at GYOPO as the co-chair of the Design and Identity committee alongside Julie Cho.
Christine Y. Kim, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is co-curator of the 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018), and curator of LACMA exhibitions "Isaac Julien: Playtime" (2019) and "Julie Mehretu" (2019). The middle child of Korean immigrant parents who met as college students in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, Kim grew up in San Francisco. As Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000-08), she organized "Black Belt" (2003), the institution's first exhibition to present work by Asian diasporic artists on the the topic of a cross-cultural and -racial solidarity through American popular culture from the 1970s and 80s.
Eric Kim founded the nonprofit performance art space Human Resources Los Angeles in 2010 with a team of creative individuals seeking to to broaden engagement with contemporary and conceptual art, with an emphasis on performative and underexposed modes of expression. HRLA seeks to foster widespread public appreciation of the performative arts by encouraging maximum community access.
Kibum Kim is a lawyer and writer interested in the interactions of art, culture, politics, law, and business. He co-runs the gallery Commonwealth & Council in Los Angeles, and is Co-Founder and Director of the NEWD Art Show, an artist-centric art fair in New York showcasing artist-run spaces and nonprofits. Kim has worked as an M&A investment banker at Société Générale and as a freelance journalist covering fashion and cultural trends. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, and Hyperallergic. He is a former Co-Chair of the Young Lawyers Section of the Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Committee of the New York State Bar Association and served on the board of Momenta Art.
Yoon Ju Ellie Lee was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is the Executive Director of Equitable Vitrines, a public art non-profit organization. Equitable Vitrines aims to expand and inform the collective understanding of art in public places. In addition to her work with Equitable Vitrines and GYOPO, Ellie sits on the board of directors of the Korea Arts Foundation of America.
Alex Paik is an artist, community builder, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. Paik is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and serves on the Steering Committee at GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals.
Jeanha Park is a museum registrar at the Hammer Museum, where she gets to touch artwork (with gloves), and project manager at Public-Library, where she gets to help bring creative visions to life.
cat yang lives and works in Koreatown, Los Angeles. She is a cultural worker, organizer, and writer. Her work centers on advancing equity by producing art, design, research, communications, and public programming as tools to make space public and personal. With experience in the arts and culture landscape and social justice spaces, she thrives when working with artists and local communities on dynamic projects and programs to imagine and build a more informed and inclusive city. She is on the Steering Committee of GYOPO and a co-organizer of Ktown For Black Lives. Yang received a BA from UCLA in Geography.
Board of Directors
Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is co-curator of the 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018), and curator of forthcoming LACMA exhibitions "Isaac Julien: Playtime" (2019) and "Julie Mehretu" (2019). The middle child of Korean immigrant parents who met as college students in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, Kim grew up in San Francisco. As Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000-08), she organized "Black Belt" (2003), the institution's first exhibition to present work by Asian diasporic artists on the the topic of a cross-cultural and -racial solidarity through American popular culture from the 1970s and 80s.
Eric Kim founded the nonprofit performance art space Human Resources Los Angeles in 2010 with a team of creative individuals seeking to to broaden engagement with contemporary and conceptual art, with an emphasis on performative and underexposed modes of expression. HRLA seeks to foster widespread public appreciation of the performative arts by encouraging maximum community access.
Yoon Ju Ellie Lee was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is the Executive Director of Equitable Vitrines, a public art non-profit organization. Equitable Vitrines aims to expand and inform the collective understanding of art in public places. In addition to her work with Equitable Vitrines and GYOPO, Ellie sits on the board of directors of the Korea Arts Foundation of America.
Miyoung Lee currently serves as Vice Chair of the Whitney Museum of America. She is also on the Acquisition Committee of the Studio Museum of Harlem. Her contemporary art collection is eclectic with an emphasis on emerging artists and women. She resides in New York.
Informed by scientific research, biology, and perfumers, Anicka Yi has produced a unique body of work over the past decade at the intersection of politics and macrobiotics. Her practice questions the increasingly hazy taxonomic distinctions between what is human, animal, plant and machine, and is the result of an alchemical process of experimentation that explores often incompatible materials. She collaborates with researchers to create media that are often inherently political, and delves into the cultural conditioning of sense and perception in a way she describes as a "biopolitics of the senses." Her diverse installations, which draw on scientific concepts and techniques to activate vivid fictional scenarios, ask incisive questions about human psychology and the workings of society. Yi's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Yi is represented by Gladstone Gallery and 47 Canal, New York.
Present Committee Members and Volunteers
Caroline Liou
Communications
Caroline Ellen Liou is an Asian-American art worker based in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in contemporary Chinese art and geopolitics at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Jessica Youn
Communications
Christine Goo
Communications
Christine Goo is the Senior Manager of Public Programs & External Affairs at the Norton Simon Museum. She enjoys traveling with her friends to visit museums, doing deep dives into films, and watching a ton of basketball.
Sarah Hwang
Communications
Roger Kim
Communications
Roger Kim is a multidisciplinary artist who tells stories with music, text, moving graphics, dance, and interactive electronics.
Jeanha Park
Communications
Jeanha Park is a museum registrar at the Hammer Museum, where she gets to touch artwork (with gloves), and project manager at Public-Library, where she gets to help bring creative visions to life.
Jamie Joo
Communications
Jaimie Joo is a young working professional who fell in love with art history at UC Irvine. She (mostly) thinks she is doing her best.
Chung Park
Communications
Chung Park is a Korean-born American artist based in Los Angeles, California. He received his BFA from Boston University and has shown his work internationally and in the US. Outside of artmaking, Chung enjoys food experiences, reading, and walking.
Alison Choi
Communications
Alison Choi is a recent graduate of Pomona College in Claremont, CA, where she majored in History and specialized in Gender, Race, and Class in the United States. In addition to volunteering with GYOPO, Alison enjoys writing and performing music, cooking Korean food, and seven-minute morning meditations.
Lee Painter Kim
Programs
Considering their longest-lived locations ranging between 3-6 years, Painter-Kim is from Taegu, Seoul, Tampa, Richmond, and Brooklyn. As a part of their mutual aid practice, they provide archival technical assistance to activists advocating for community artists in the central LA area. Since 2018, they continue to live in Los Angeles, CA.
Soo Kim
Programs
Soo Kim often employs techniques of cutting and layering in order to introduce areas of absence or disruption in what we tend to take for granted–the interpretation of photographic images. Kim believes that the lengthy process required to create her photographs infuses them with a ‘ slowness ’ that finds its counterpart in the amount of time it takes the viewer to comprehend them. Her work often incorporates narrative elements or makes references to literature. Born in South Korea, Kim moved to Los Angeles in 1980. After earning a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Riverside, she combined studies in critical writing, art, and film at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia for her master of fine arts. Kim lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.
Hannah M. Yoo
Production
Hannah M. Yoo is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and cultural programmer. Most recently, she was Assistant Curator for Exhibition Projects at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco where she organized pan-Asian-themed exhibitions and special projects. Previously, she was curatorial assistant for Korean art where she researched and developed exhibitions, publications, and public programs. She has also held positions at LACMA and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. She holds an MA in East Asian studies with a focus on art history from Stanford and a BA in art history, theory, and criticism from the University of California San Diego.
Jisoo Chung
Production
Jisoo Chung is an LA-Seoul-based artist working primarily through video, installation, and performance. Her work navigates the relationship between individuals and systems reflected on technology while considering body, space, and language. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Chung received MFA from UCLA in the area of New Genres in 2019, and BFA from Seoul National University, Seoul, in the department of paintings. She was nominated as Artslant prize showcase winner in the new-media category and commissioned by Los Angeles County Metropolitan transportation for the new digital cips project.
Kayla Tange
Production
Kayla Tange was born in South Korea and adopted by a Japanese-American family. Her love for poetry and photography slowly progressed into a conceptual performance practice that incorporates elements of exotic dancing, where physical and psychic boundaries, sexuality, and permanence are also recurring themes. She often uses dark comedy in her performance work to explore love and longing, cultural stereotyping, and societal taboos and catharsis.
Bora Kyung Min Lee
Production
Bora is an LA-based production designer/producer in performance, film, and experiential design. She’s currently working as an animation coordinator on an HBO docuseries. In her free time, she produces independent films and art direct’s Rock n Roll band My Boyfriend.
Eugene Kim
Programs
Eugene Kim is a community music school administrator and experimental musician, cultivating a practice that reflects on pluralism, class identity, and love. He holds degrees in piano performance and composition from Oberlin Conservatory and The Royal Conservatoire of the Hague.
Daniel Lew
Production
Daniel J Kim
Production
Daniel Kim is a Korean-American portrait and documentary photographer based out Los Angeles. His recent personal work explore themes of cultural memory and loss and how they interact with the surrounding landscape. On his off days, he splits his time between climbing outdoors, racing cars or lying on the couch with his tiny cat, CJ.
Annette M. Kim
Strategy and New Initiatives
Annette M. Kim, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy. She is also the Director of SLAB, the newly formed spatial analysis laboratory at Price that advances the visualization of the social sciences for public service through teaching, research, and public engagement.
Iris Regn
Strategy and New Initiatives
Iris Anna Regn is a creative strategist, leader, and designer who draws on a background in architecture, management, social practice, and education to integrate placemaking, community building, and creative mentorship in the creation of large scale, multi-year art and design projects.
Jennifer J. Chun
Strategy and New Initiatives
Jennifer Jihye Chun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and the International Institute at UCLA. Her research and teaching explore the interconnected worlds of labor, gender, race, migration, and precarity in the global economy, with a comparative focus on protest politics and worker organizing in South Korea and the United States.
Jerome Reyes
Strategy and New Initiatives
Jerome Reyes is an artist/researcher working with ideas of architecture and alterity and is faculty at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. He’s made projects for the Yokohama Triennale, Prospect Biennial, and awarded residencies at National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art/MMCA, Korea, Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Seoul Museum of Art, and as a Researcher at Asia Culture Center, Gwangju.
Jess Y Lee
Production
Kathleen Kim
Strategy and New Initiatives
Kathleen Kim is Associate Dean of Equity & Inclusion, Professor of Law & William M. Rains Fellow at LMU Loyola Law School Los Angeles. Her scholarship, teaching, and advocacy center on immigrants’ rights and the 13th Amendment through an intersectional race and gender-critical theory lens. Kathleen is also an experimental musician and composer who performs and records solo and collaborative work in avant jazz and performance art contexts.
Grace Hong
Programs
Grace Kyungwon Hong is the Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Professor in the Department of Gender Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her research and teaching expertise is in women of color feminism, Asian American cultural production, and comparative racialization.
Alex Ahn
Development
Jackilin Hah Bloom
Development
Jackilin Hah Bloom is an architectural designer and educator based in Los Angeles. She is Design Faculty at SCI-Arc, and principal of JHB Studio, a creative practice grounded in art and culture to produce architecture at multiple scales, dimensions, and economies.
Kang Seung Lee
Development
Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2015). Lee has had solo exhibitions and projects at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2021); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2020); Hapjungjigu, Seoul (2019); One and J. Gallery, Seoul (2018); Artpace, San Antonio (2017); Baik Art, Los Angeles (2017); Commonwealth and Council (2017, 2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2016); Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont (2015); and Centro Cultural Border, Mexico City (2012).
Grace Oh
Development
Grace Oh is an advocate for intersectional contemporary art across various cultural organizations in Los Angeles and the Managing Director of Formation Association, an award-winning architecture firm with a wide-ranging body of work. Formation Association cultivates ongoing work with LA artists which has been presented both locally and internationally via cultural channels and institutions such as the Main Museum, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Hammer Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Mona Bismarck American Center for Art and Culture in Paris.
Lisa Kwon
Communications
Lisa Kwon is a writer with a background in digital and social media work in the entertainment industry. Her reports on local communities and culture have been published in outlets such as Eater, L.A. Taco, TheLAnd, and Hyphen Magazine.
Abe Ahn
Development
Abe is a writer based in Los Angeles. He contributes to Hyperallergic and supports arts education initiatives at the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.
Michelle Jihyon Kim
Development
Michelle Jihyon Kim is a student finishing her last year at the University of California, Los Angeles. Beyond her passion for filmmaking, Kim is also a Youth Advisory Council member for the nonprofit Snap Foundation where she is able to develop grants for arts-based organizations in Los Angeles.
Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Programs
Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies (GSST) at the University of California, Riverside. Prof. Baik has published widely in venues including the Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Periscope/Social Text, and the Oral History Review, among other journals and anthology volumes. Her first sole-authored book, Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique (2019) examines the everydayness of the Korean War and its racialized gendered implications through a diasporic archive of subversive memory works, including oral history projects, ‘ re-performances,’ and video installations.
Yong Soon Min
Programs
Yong Soon Min received Fulbright Senior Research Grant, COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, Korea Foundation Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Guggenheim Foundation grant and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Visual Artist Award in New Genre. She exhibited at the 4th and 10th Havana Bienal, 7th Gwangju Bienal and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Smith College Museum and LACMA; and curated THERE: Sites of Korean Diaspora for 4th Gwangju Biennale and transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix. Min served on the national Board of Directors of CAA and Korean American Museum and is Professor Emerita at UC Irvine, with MFA from UC Berkeley, followed by a postdoc at Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program.
Alex Paik
Programs
Alex Paik is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. His modular, paper-based wall installations explore the mutability and interdependence of forms and structures. He has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, with notable solo projects at Praxis New York, Art on Paper 2016, and Gallery Joe. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at BravinLee Projects, Ruschman Gallery, and MONO Practice, among others. Paik is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and organizes Correspondence Archive, an online series of conversations between artists of color.
Joann Kohng
Programs
Hannah Pae
Programs
Hannah Pae is an artist and landscape designer who focuses on ethnographic and cultural landscapes. She designs and builds gardens for the Los Angeles community.
Ginny Hwang
Programs
Ginny Hwang is a Los Angeles-based plant designer of edible and native gardens with an emphasis on promoting biodiversity and closed-loop practices within smaller urban landscapes.
Laura Ha Reizman
Programs
Laura received her PHD in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her research re-evaluates post-1945 South Korean history by examining the history and representation of mixed-race Koreans born of and after the Korean War. Before entering the PhD program, Laura worked in nonprofit grant writing, event planning, and publishing. She loves teaching and mentoring and enjoys working with students at all stages of research.
Emma Kang
Programs
Jiyhe Choi
Programs and Admin
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