I am the co-organizer of a symposium on Nikkei Art hosted by the Department of History at the University of Southern California in February 2025. I’ll be presenting elements of my dissertation research, focusing on how artists offer critical new perspectives on the politics of cultural preservation in Little Tokyo and the Arts District.” 

I recently contributed an essay on Toyo Miyatake, Matsumi Kanemitsu, and Bruce Yonemoto to illuminate pre and postwar artistic activity in Little Tokyo for the catalogue of the forthcoming MOCA Los Angeles exhibition Afterlives: Japanese American Artists and the Postwar Era.

At the 2025 Cultural Studies Association and Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, I shared in-progress work theorizing from the community-based efforts that led to UCLA Special Collection’s acquisition of the Matsumi Kanemitsu archive.

As a curator, I extend my critical engagements through collaborative projects. For the 30th anniversary of the Asian diasporic literary publisher, in collaboration with USC Visions and Voices and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, I spearheaded an artist residency that culminated in an immersive event and an exhibition that used the Kaya Press archive to reimagine cultural transmission. A forthcoming publication entitled “Archiving Tendencies: Alan Nakagawa and Umi Hsu” articulates and expands this collaborative project’s foundational lines of inquiry and will be published in The Politics of the Archive: Reimagining Visual Histories of Asian Diasporas, a special issue of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas.

Other in-progress research includes “Transpacific Artists in Los Angeles: Learning from 1984, Looking to 2028.”