Oral History Project Team
ROCHELLE HOI-YIU KWAN, Program Manager
Rochelle Hoi-Yiu Kwan (she/her) is an oral history educator and cultural organizer whose work aims to equip communities with the tools to build multigenerational oral history projects. Based in New York City’s Manhattan Chinatown, she builds her practice around engaging communities as our classroom and amplifying the essential role of relationship building and the arts in storytelling and organizing. As the Community Producer at Self Evident, she leads their growing oral history training and archiving program. She has also worked with partners such as the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Hunter College Asian American Studies Program, StoryCorps, and Think!Chinatown. In tandem with her oral history work, she is an artist and DJ celebrating the breadth of music and history that comes with family record collections inherited from her Chinatown neighbors and family.
JEN NG, UX Designer
A Midwestern gal at heart with big-city valor, Jen moved to New York City from Madison, Wisconsin in 2006 to work in the melting pot of all things creative. Jen did PR for lifestyle brands like BAGGU and SOCIETY FOR RATIONAL DRESS; and art directed photo shoots for BUST MAGAZINE and VENUS ZINE. Having worked closely with small companies with big hearts and missions, she wanted to find a way to bridge the gap between the brand and the user. Jen now specialize in UX and visual design. In between, she work on social justice projects rooted in LGBTQIA+ topics, race relations, youth empowerment and women's advocacy for non-profits like WILLIE MAE ROCK CAMP FOR GIRLS; the podcast THE HEART; and most recently, the virtual event series DESIGN x ACTIVISM.
JAMES BOO, Managing Producer
The recipient of two storytelling fellowships at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP, James delivers documentaries that make a social impact through community engagement and partnership. For the past decade he’s created intimate narratives that reveal how legacies are cultivated, performed, preserved, broken, and lost at the local level. His award-winning web series, 1 Minute Meal, uses food to reveal the communities, dreams, realities, and unseen forces that shape life in New York. Prior to that, James worked at a B2B education technology company, directing a global team to ensure that product owners and curriculum authors could effectively integrate AI-driven assignments and course pathways into their instructional designs.
KEN IKEDA, Executive Producer
Ken is a founding partner of the production and media strategy startup, Studiotobe. In his many lives, he has been CEO of Association of Independents in Radio, co-founded a hip hop label, was Executive Director of BAVC, ran a public radio/tv M&A operation, founded a youth media organization for high schoolers, served on the boards of the Center for Asian American Media and Youth Speaks, and was the architect of what is now NPR Live Sessions.
MORIAH ULINSKAS, Advisor
Moriah Ulinskas is an audiovisual archivist whose work supports collections that fall outside mainstream historical narratives and institutions. Her work focuses primarily on the preservation and description of analog audiovisual materials (photography, film, video, and audio) and the development of access points to these materials through public programs. From 2011 to 2017, she served as Diversity Chair for the Association of Moving Image Archivists; she has been an organizing member of the Community Archiving Workshop since 2012, and was Preservation Program Director at the Bay Area Video Coalition from 2011 to 2014. She is a contributor to the recently published Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps, edited by Linda L. Ivey and Kevin W. Kaatz, and is pursuing a PhD in Public History at UC Santa Barbara and CSU Sacramento.
NGOC-TRAN VU, Advisor
Ngoc-Tran Vu is an interdisciplinary and transnational artist whose socially engaged work draws from her experience as a community organizer, educator, and healer. Tran received her MA in Arts and Politics at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and her BA in Ethnic Studies and Visual Arts at Brown University. She teaches workshops on storytelling, digital marketing, financial literacy, housing strategies for artists, and has taught in the Future Imagemakers program at NYU's Tisch Department of Photography. Tran is also a graduate of the Center for Third World Organizing’s Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program (MAAP) and a board member of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB). Currently, she’s an adjunct faculty teaching an Asian American Studies course titled “Asian Women in the United States” at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Previously, Tran worked at AIR (Association of Independents in Radio) to support and advocate for freelance producers and media makers in mission-driven storytelling.
DOROTHY TANG, Advisor
Dorothy Tang is an audio content creator interested in people-powered media and making knowledge accessible to all. Believing deeply in a queer of color approach to knowledge production and storytelling, Dorothy has produced their own podcast Gayzn Baby Girls ! and API Equality’s (APIENC) Dragon Fruit Podcast. As a journalist, they have produced and reported on topics ranging from queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) narratives, Asian American politics, environmental justice, and mental health.
TRICIA WANG, Advisor
Tricia Wang is a global tech ethnographer living at the intersection of data, design, and digital. Her passion is to help organizations uncover how our bias towards the quantifiable comes at the expense of profits and people, and how to fix it. She is the co-founder of Sudden Compass, a consulting firm that helps enterprises move at the speed of their customers by unlocking new growth opportunities in their big data with human insights in their digital transformation. She also co-founded Magpie Kingdom, a consultancy that helps globally minded companies gain actionable insights about the Chinese consumer. When not working with organizations, she spends the other half of her life researching the intersection of technology and culture--the investigation of how social media and the internet affect identity-making, trust formation, and collective action. Tricia has a BA in Communications and Ph.D. in Sociology. She holds affiliate positions at Data & Society, Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet Studies and New York University's Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP).
Self Evident is grateful for the invaluable experience, partnership, and guidance of an extraordinary set of educators, who have shaped this oral history program with us.