Confirmed Speakers

Don’t forget to check back regularly for updates on confirmed speakers!

John J. Kim is a photographer at the Chicago Tribune. In 2011, he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting along with two other reporters for their series on community violence in Chicago. As part of their project, he and another reporter shadowed members of the Chicago Police Department’s homicide unit to capture the devastation wreaked by murders on Chicago’s Northwest side. Kim was born in Busan, Korea, and graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in communications.

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Curtis Chin is the director/producer of the documentary “Vincent Who?”(2009) and a board member of Asian Pacific Americans for Progress (APAP). The documentary details the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers. The murder sparked a movement that united and galvanized the Asian American communities into unprecedented action, and “Vincent Who?” begins the process of asking how far Asian Americans have come since then and how far we have yet to go.

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Pauline Park is a New York-based transgender activist and co-founder of the Queens Pride House, a center for the LGBTQ communities of Queens, and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in NY. Born in Korea, she was adopted by European American parents and raised in the Midwest. Park received her BA in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M. Sc. in European Studies at the London School of Economics, and a Ph. D. in Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where she was a Fulbright Scholar.

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Iris Shim is a filmmaker and the director of “The House of Suh”, a documentary that stemmed from Shim’s personal friendship with Andrew Suh, a convicted murderer who is serving 100 years for killing his sister’s boyfriend in 1993—under her bidding. The film strives to strip away the sensationalism and focus attention on the intergenerational and cultural conflicts that broke apart the Suh family and which remain relevant to all immigrant families. Shim is currently working on her MFA in Film at Columbia University in New York.

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Marie Myung-Ok Lee is Writer-in-Residence and Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Slate, and The New York Times, and she has been honored by the MacColl Johnson literature fellowship and the 2010 Fiction fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her first novel, Somebody’s Daughter (2005), is based on the oral histories of Korean birth mothers of adopted children, which she collected during her year as a Fulbright scholar in Korea.

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Keish Kim is a Korean American undocumented immigrant and co-founder of the Georgia Undocumented Youth Alliance (GUYA), which this year sucessfully won a fight against bills that would have further restricted access to higher education for undocumented immigrants. She is a student supporter of Freedom University, which is a volunteer-led organization that aims to provide college-level education to students, regardless of their immigration status.

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Franny Choi, Brown ’11, is an award-winning spoken word artist and poet whose work “explores the collisions of identities, the volatile nature of language, and the haunting relationship between an artist’s body & her body of work.” In 2011, Franny was a finalist at two of the three most prestigious poetry slams in the country: the National Poetry Slam and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She was also an invited speaker at the 2012 TEDxBoston. Apart from writing and performing, Franny is an organizer with the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), a non-profit organization that supports Southeast Asian youth with the resources necessary to become critical thinkers and leaders.

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Steven Choi is Executive Director of the Minkwon Center for Community Action, a Queens-based organization that works to empower Asian American immigrant community members through grassroots outreach, community education, leadership development, and advocacy and mobilization campaigns. A second-generation Korean American, Choi led the effort to establish the Korean Immigrant Workers Rights Project, which provided free direct legal services to low-wage Korean immigrants—the first and only project of its kind on the East Coast.

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Christine Yoo is the writer, director, and producer of upcoming comedy Wedding Palace, which is the first U.S.-Korea independent co-production and stars Brian Tee (Fast & Furious 3: Tokyo Drift), Kang Hye-jung (Old Boy), Bobby Lee, and Margaret Cho. The film centers on an international online romance and will touch upon themes of cultural differences between Koreans and Korean Americans, the loaded significance of marriage, and intergenerational differences within families. Yoo has represented Asians in Hollywood at the 2012 White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders’ Briefing on Philanthropy and will direct for the 2012 5^th Annual NBC Diversity Showcase.

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Karen Chung is a serial entrepreneur who in 2010 founded Special Learning, Inc., a company dedicated to providing innovative solutions for the global autism community. Her family immigrated from South Korea to Chicago in 1975. Chung has a B.S. in accounting from Northern Illinois University and an MBA from
the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She founded and served as CEO of Nomadic Diversity Solutions, a niche retained executive search firm specializing in placing women and minority executives. Chung is a frequent speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and private equity, and is a founding member of the graduate-level program focused on women’s leadership at Benedictine University.
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Mark Ro Beyersdorf is a queer, second-generation, mixed-race Korean American activist who is part of the Coordinating Committee of the Dari Project, an all-volunteer grassroots effort that aims to share the personal testimonies and art of LGBTQ people of Korean descent. He is also on the staff of the Educational Equity and Youth Rights Project at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) and is active in New York City as a member of Nodutdol, a progressive Korean diasporic organization, and the Board of Directors of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities.

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Min Kim heads business development at DramaFever, the leading online video platform for international TV specializing in Korean dramas and Latino telenovelas. He previously co-founded 2 consumer startups and led user growth at Reclip.It, a 500 Startups incubated company in Mountain View, CA. He is also the founder and organizer of Anytech Meetup, 200 member group in New York that empowers Asian American entrepreneurs. Born in Korea and raised in Los Angeles, Min studied Economics and Political Science at the University of Chicago and began his career at DraftFCB ad agency.

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Rosally Sapla is part of the leadership team at DramaFever, America’s leading streaming service that focuses on bringing online audiences primetime TV series from Asia, Latin America and Spain. Rosally has garnered featured media placements in top-tier and influential outlets such as the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, New York Times, USA Today, REUTERS, CNBC, ABC News, Variety, and NPR. PR clients included Standard & Poor’s, S&P Capital IQ, SONY’s Crackle, Yale University, the region of Galicia (Spain), Church & Dwight, and Schick. In 2006, Rosally helped create the storytelling phenomenon called the “Six-Word Memoir”, which was one of Twitter’s first partnerships and became a five-book deal with Harper Collins, as well as a New York Times Bestseller.
 In 2009, she helped launch DramaFever, as a pro bono consultant, providing the original marketing strategy and messaging which helped attract the company’s first partnership with Hulu. In June 2012, Rosally joined DramaFever full-time. She holds a Bachelors degree from Fordham University in Economics with a minor in Business.

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Eddo Kim is the founder & CEO of The Supply, a global development organization building low-cost private secondary schools in urban slums and empowering the slum children to combat their community’s plights through an innovative service-learning curriculum. Combining passion with a thirst for research, Eddo holds steadfastly onto the belief that these informal settlements are the future of global cities. Eddo, a native Southern Californian, received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, M.A. in Education Leadership at Columbia University, and Ed.M. in International Education Policy from Harvard. At the age of 29, Eddo is recognized as one of today’s leading, young social designers and humanitarians.

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Jamie Lew is associate professor of sociology at Rutgers—Newark. She received her Ph.D. in comparative education and sociology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research area includes sociology of education, immigration and education, race and ethnicity. She focuses on school achievement and identities of immigrant children, with a particular focus on Asian American communities.

She is the author of Asian Americans in Class: Charting the Achievement Gap Among Korean American Youths (Teachers College Press, 2006). By using Korean Americans as a case study, this book examines how stratifying forces of class, race, and school impact academic achievement among 1.5- and second-generation Asian American youths in urban context.  Her current research focuses on how immigration and changing demographics affect urban and suburban schools as they relate to school achievement, race relations, and education reform policies.

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Hannah Chung is a doodler, maker, and a social entrepreneur. She is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Sproutel which makes interactive learning solutions for people who are diagnosed with a chronic illness. Sproutel’s first product, Jerry the Bear, helps children with Type-1 Diabetes build compliant behaviors earlier and empower them throughout their lives. Sproutel was named as one of “5 startups to use tech to do good” by Mashable.

She also co-founded Design for America – an award-winning nationwide network of interdisciplinary student teams and community members using design to create local and social impact. DFA currently has 14 studios across the nation with over 500 students solving complex problems.
Hannah graduated from Northwestern University in 2012. She was listed as one of “Top 15 Women to Watch in Tech” by Inc in 2012. She has given numerous talks at events including Health 2.0, TEDx, Institute for the Future, and Singularity University.

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Esther K. Chae is an award-winning actor/writer based in Los Angeles and New York. Her work has been performed in the US, Korea, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Italy, Nigeria and Russia. Esther has acted in television shows such as NCIS, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, The West Wing, 24, The Shield; and on theatre stages such as Yale Repertory Theater, La Mama, and Harvard/A.R.T. As a writer, Esther created and performed So the Arrow Flies, her internationally acclaimed solo performance about a North Korean spy and the FBI agent who brings her down. It is currently being adapted for film. Esther is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama (M.F.A. in Acting), University of Michigan (M.A. in Theater Studies), and Korea University (B.A. French Literature).

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Rej Joo is a 1.5-generation Korean American born in Seoul and raised in Portland, OR. After graduating from Wagner College in Staten Island, he has spent the last nine years serving various marginalized communities (i.e., homeless youth, LGBTQ, API, and HIV-affected) as a youth advocate, community organizer, activist, and case manager. He currently attends the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and will receive his Masters in Public Health this spring. Rej enjoys staying physically active through martial arts and one day aspires to be a good Janggu & Buk player (Korean drumming).

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Kublai Kwon is a Korean promoter, concert tour organizer, activist, writer, and historian who was born in Olympia, WA, raised in Auburn, AL, enlightened at the University of Oxford, and educated in the streets of Los Angeles. After dropping out of the English literature Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California in 2001, Kwon moved several blocks north to Koreatown, Los Angeles, where he began organizing hip hop shows featuring local Asian youth artists. In 2002, Kwon organized the first Asian Hip Hop Summit on the ten-year anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots, raising money for North Korean victims of US economic oppression. In 2003, Kwon discovered rap group Far East Movement and organized their first shows, and in the following year discovered rapper Dumbfoundead. He also discovered rap group Yellow Boyz, who appeared on Superstar K with PSY. Kwon has published two books on Amazon’s Kindle, one a revision of the history of Korea, and the other a revision of the history of Asia. Today, Kwon is based in Koreatown, LA, where he continues to organize national hip hop tours through his company Red Mountain Agency, while also working on his third book.

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Sophia Hong is Director of Business Development and Operations at MTV. She is tasked with launching a new property called MTV K, which focuses on delivering the increasingly popular genre of K-Pop to the American market. Previously, Sophia worked strategy at Nickelodeon and launched a multi-million dollar global digital learning initiative at Sesame Workshop. She was also the Deputy Campaign Manager for Jun Choi’s mayoral campaign in Edison, NJ, partaking in a historical moment when he became the first Asian American mayor of a major city in NJ.
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Paul PK Kim is the founder and Executive Director of Kollaboration, a non-profit organization and Asian talent show, which is now in its 14th year and draws over 20,000 people annually in fourteen cities. He is also the co-founder of LiNK, Liberty in North Korea, a non-profit organization dedicated to bring awareness to the needs of North Korean refugees. In 2012, he was invited to the White House as a Champion of Change for his contributions to the community. PK was born and raised on the rough streets of south central Burbank, CA, and grew up as a preacher’s kid (PK = preacher’s kid, but also Paul Kim). He is an experienced stand-up comedian and manages a wedding events company called Prokreation Productions, through which he has emceed, DJ’d, and provided sound for over 300 weddings and events.
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Yuri Tag is a dancer, interior designer, and actress who has been dancing and performing since the age of 5. She received a B.A. in Social Ecology at U.C. Irvine and an A.S. in Interior Design at Orange Coast College. While at UCI, she trained with Kaba Modern dance crew, where she initially discovered her passion for dance, embarking on a journey with five other members of Kaba Modern to become finalists on the first season of the hit MTV show, America’s Best Dance Crew. Since then she has travelled all over the world to dance and work in film, print, and commercials. Recently she was featured in AT&T and Wong Fu Productions’ “When It Counts” miniseries. When she’s not dancing or on set, she keeps busy with interior design projects and leading children through music and dance at her church.

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David L. Kim is a consultant to Diageo and serves on the Multicultural Marketing Advisory Board, where he provides counsel on strategy to promote and protect the company’s business in the United States and Asia. Formerly Vice President of Multicultural Markets and Engagement at AARP, Kim was responsible for increasing the relevance and engagement of the growing Asian, Latino and African American segments of a 37-million member non-profit, non-partisan association dedicated to social change in the United States. Prior to joining AARP, Kim completed a three-year appointment as Chief of Staff at the United States Mint, serving as senior advisor to the Director and leading the first ever branding campaign at the Mint. Before his appointment, Kim held several corporate positions at Anheuser-Busch Companies. In 2008, he received the Presidential Volunteer Service Award from President George W. Bush.

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Miru Kim is a New York-based artist who has explored various urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, sewers, catacombs, factories, hospitals, and shipyards. For her series The Pig Therefore I Am, which examines the relationship between pigs and humans, she has visited various industrial hog farms. She is currently traveling the Gobi, Sahara, and Arabian deserts for her newest project, The Camel’s Way. She was featured as one of America’s Best and Brightest 2007 in Esquire magazine. Her work has been spotlighted in other international media, such as The New York Times, TED, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, CNN Turkey, The Korea Herald.  Public collections of her work include Seoul Museum of Art, The Museum of Photography in Seoul, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul.