Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories.

His introduction to AAJIL came in 2020 when he was invited to present his participatory poetry project to the AAJIL Poetry Lab. Since then as both participant and workshop collaborator, Nakagawa has worked with the AAJIL community through social practice.

Nakagawa is also currently the artist-in-resident at the Gerth Archives, California State University Dominguez Hills assigned to the newly acquired L.A. Free Press/Art Kunkin Collection.

His first book, “A.I.R.Head: Anatomy of an Artist in Residence” was published in January 2023 by Writ-Large Press. It maps his artistic trajectory that led to his nine artist-in-residencies in six years.

He was the first artist in resident for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the Los Angeles County Library. Nakagawa was invited by the Smithsonian Museum of American History to research the development of the hearing aid in the US. He currently resides in Los Angeles’ Koreatown and continues to exhibit and develop his creative practice.

Angela (they/them) is a Visionary Organizing and Kingian Nonviolence facilitator-trainer working towards a world where we have increased capacities to sit with our own and each other’s complexities. Angela stewards community containers where participants can share grief, practice conflict skills, and be co-opted into emergence inspired by the erotic, the intuitive, the divine, and the more-than-human. Angela has facilitated several AAJIL labs and PSFJ sessions on the themes of embodied relationship with nature, conflict and de-escalation skills, ancestry, and grief.

Jean Park (she/her) was an AAJIL Director from 2019-2023. She is a Program Manager at API Forward Movement, a nonprofit working to cultivate healthy and sustainable Asian and Pacific Islander communities through community-centered engagement, education, and advocacy. She is currently working on school greening projects in the San Gabriel Valley and is a member of the Sustainable SGV Coalition.

Jozelle Wong Yu, MA (she/they) is a neuroqueer Filipinx-Chinese creator, coach, and cultural movement-maker who alchemizes softness into strength. She created Consensual Cuddles, a healing space where platonic cuddling nurtures the friendship revolution, consent is currency, and communication is an artful portal into liberatory connection. Jozelle is also the former Communications Director at AAJIL where she fell in love with grassroots organizing, emergent strategy, and the power of community building.

K Yin (they/them/ta) is an amateur potter, passionate cook, and PhD student in American Studies at Brown University. Their research considers Asian/American art, queer and trans* of color critique, settler-colonial studies, the environment, and speculative forms. They work and reside on Narragansett land.

K was part of the 2022 AAJIL Formations cohort and co-facilitated a community lab that considered Asian/American gender. They hope to offer learning sessions and discussions that think critically about Asian American identity politics and illuminate places of shared minoritarian historical and contemporary struggle. They are oriented toward questions of ritual, memory, and land. 

Karo Ska (they/them) is a Bengali-Polish gender-fluid writer living on unceded Tongva land. Their writing focuses on identity, mental health, and the intersections of trauma and oppressive systems. They have taught on multiple college campuses, including Mt. Saint Mary’s University and Pasadena Community College. Their work has been supported by DSTL Arts, Community Literature Initiative, Anaphora Arts, and Tin House Summer Workshop. Author of "loving my salt-drenched bones" (World Stage Press, 2022), they are currently working on a memoir. They have taught multiple classes for AAJIL focused on poetry, including “Finding our Way Home: Writing Collective Ghazals” and “Elegies: Writing Through Grief and Loss."

Melissa Anran Fan (she/they) is a healing arts practitioner, somatic bodyworker, community organizer, and human in process living in service to collective liberation. She has a MA in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Expressive Arts Therapy from CIIS and additional training in somatic therapy, eco therapy, and hypnotherapy. She's worked as a trauma therapist for BIPOC youth in Oakland, a relationship coach for co-housing cooperatives, facilitated retreats for grassroots orgs, and run a variety of educational and healing workshops (many with AAJIL!). Her PSfJ teaching interests center around holistic healing, transformative justice, and liberatory parenting. She lives in unceded Ohlone land in the East Bay of California with her partner, their 2 kids, and a dog. www.melissaanranfan.com

Ricky Blissett is the Associate Director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Life at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Their research primarily focuses on attitudes and ideologies in the politics of educational equity and justice, as well as the spaces in which public ideologies translate into policy action. Work in this area has included research on anti-racism activism and social movements in education, gender ideologies and the rights of transgender youth, and social psychological dimensions of public attitudes torward race-conscious policies in education. They are also the principal investigator of the Democracy and Equity in Education Politics research group, have been a lab co-leader for the Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab, and serve as the principal coordinator for the Just Education Policy institute.

Shengxiao Yu (she/her), known by her nickname Sole, is a speaker, facilitator, writer, and social justice educator. She is the creator of Nectar, a space where she provides political education for the community through giving keynote speeches, facilitating workshops, and providing thought leadership. Sole is the Progressive Partnerships Director at The Management Center where she oversees foundation partnerships that provide capacity-building support to grassroots organizations working in social change. Sole is also a writer for the Xin Sheng Project, a platform combating misinformation in the Chinese diaspora community by publishing in-language, progressive articles that shift perspectives and build intergenerational power. Sole has been a fellow of the Leadership Institute at the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment. As a generation 1.5 Asian American, Sole is also working to build community among her fellow Asian Americans in order to build socio-political power and to lift up her lineage. Sole is inspired by BIPOC activists, grassroots community leaders, and all the intersectional movement ancestors who have paved the way.

Through AAJIL, Sole is interested in teaching workshops that help to contextualize our personal experiences in the broader socio-political context of Asian America. Sole approaches her workshops with the spirit of embracing complexity knowing that the personal and the political are always intertwined.

Sole lives and works on unceded Tongva and Kizh land, colonially known as Los Angeles.