Born in San Francisco and raised in Los Angeles, Lena Chen is a Chinese American writer, scholar, and artist currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. As an artist, her work centers on creating performance and socially engaged art in live and virtual contexts. At the core of her practice, she examines topics around Asian American histories of sex, labor, and migration through the lenses of new media, social practice, and performance. By combining methods from art and social justice to engage audiences, she challenges them to reimagine personal and collective histories, creating mutual care networks and platforms for self-representation in the process.
Lena was awarded the Mozilla Foundation's 2022 Creative Media Award, and was named Best Emerging Talent at the 2019 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals around the world, including at Transmediale (Berlin), Haus der Kulturen de Welt (Berlin), the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, the Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), the Centre for Contemporary Art (Derry-Londonderry), and the Science Gallery Detroit, amongst others.
She has been awarded grants and residencies from Sundance Institute, Mozilla Foundation, UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, Millay Colony for the Arts, the Pittsburgh Foundation, Office of Public Art, Burning Man Global Arts Fund, Civic Media Lab, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Wave Pool Gallery, Women's Media Center, and the Kelly Strayhorn Theater. Lena is a co-founder of JADED, Heal Her, and the artist collective Maternal Fantasies. She has spoken widely on feminist art and activism at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Ars Electronica, SXSW, and re:publica.
She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon School of Fine Art.
C. Ryu (formerly Caroline Yoo) is an interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in the United States to Korean immigrants. Ryu's artistic practice focuses on using translation as a tool to map forgotten histories and perform contemporary translations of rituals for the living through performance, social practice, intimate gatherings, and video installations. By focusing on hidden and silenced perspectives of the past in this process, C. shines a light on the psychological shadows that haunt the Korean diaspora and highlights the complicated structures of empire and power while unraveling imperial illusions. Throughout their process, C. uses these various mediums to conflate documentary and science fiction to showcase the warped nature of emotional time in migration storytelling.
In C.'s social practice, they strive for radical existence to envision space as alternative learning models for kinships, dreaming wild, processing unheard inheritance, or planting grounds for new futures.
C. is a co-founder and co-leader of Hwa Records, JADED, and Han Diaspora Group—all artist collectives that focus on different aspects of the Asian diaspora experience. They have performed, exhibited and culturally produced at Carnegie Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; University of Southern California; University of Michigan Ann Arbor; the Kelly Strayhorn Theater; and more.
Ryu received her BFA in Studio Art from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University. They have taught as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Carlow University. She is currently in the process of producing their next performance that will reimagine forgotten Korean goddess mythology and demonology that is set to debut in Pittsburgh, PA in August, 2025.