Executive Director + Co-Founder
Executive Director + Co-Founder
Executive Director + Co-Founder
Kat Evasco
Storytelling Workshop Instructor
Kat Evasco
Storytelling Workshop Instructor
Photo By Claire Rice
Kat Evasco is an award-winning writer, stand up comedian, performance artist, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Los Angeles where she was raised. Evasco recently became the Artistic Director of Guerrilla Rep, a theater company with the mission to break silence and end isolation by producing and developing works of theater based on real life.
She has performed at venues including the Haha Cafe, San Jose Improv, the Purple Onion, Napa Valley Opera House, Logan Center for the Arts, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and FringeArts. Evasco is most well known for her autobiographical one-woman show, Mommy Queerest. This work chronicles the coming-out process of a lesbian daughter and a closeted lesbian mother, illustrating how the reclaiming of their sexuality challenges and strengthens their relationship. Mommy Queerest aims to celebrate sexuality, eradicate homophobia and break cycles of abuse. After a well-received workshop run at Bindlestiff Studio in 2011, Mommy Queerest premiered at The EXIT Theater in San Francisco in 2014 selling out an extended six week run. Mommy Queerest was last presented by The Theater Offensive in Boston in 2015 through the National Performance Network.
Evasco currently serves as the Chief Dream Director in San Francisco for The Future Project. Previously, she was the lead production manager for Youth Speaks and Brave New Voices and the Managing Director of Guerrilla Rep. She also served as the Board President and Development Director for Bindlestiff Studio, helping lead the opening of the first and only theater space in the country dedicated to cultivating Filipino artists. Evasco is a recipient of the Creative Capacity Fund Quick Grant, NextGen Art Professional Development Grant, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation Grant. She also received scholarships from the California Endowment and the James Irvine Foundation to train with MacArthur Fellow, Anna Deveare Smith at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Evasco holds a BA in Asian American Studies from San Francisco State University.
Check out her work at:
Kat Evasco
The Future Project
Storytelling Workshop Instructor
Dragon Fruit Project
The Dragon Fruit Project is a program of APIENC and is an intergenerational oral history project that explores queer Asian Pacific Islanders and their experiences with love and activism in the 1960s – 90s.
Visibility Project
The Visibility Project combines art, media and social justice to document the personal experiences of Queer Asian American Women + Trans + Gender non-conforming folks. Our community is frequently overlooked, ignored, and disregarded by society at large. The cultivation of this project was a direct response to change that dynamic one face, one story, one participant at a time. The Visibility Project is intergenerational and multi-racial. It provides a platform that allows participants to self-identify, share their histories and experiences. The result is a diverse representation of what it means to be a Queer Asian American that transcends linguistic, cultural, and generational barriers.
APIENC
API Equality – Northern California (APIENC) works to build LGBTQ API power by amplifying our voices and increasing visibility to our communities. Through organizing, we inspire and train leaders, establish intergenerational connections, and document and disseminate our histories. The Dragon Fruit Project is a program of APIENC and is an intergenerational oral history project that explores queer Asian Pacific Islanders and their experiences with love and activism in the 1960s – 90s.
Storytelling Facilitator & Volunteer Coordinator
Archive & Development Assistant
Lenore Chinn
Lenore Chinn
Lenore Chinn has been known primarily for her painting, focusing on portraiture to explore the super-realistic depiction of a wide spectrum of people of color, lesbians and same sex couples. Employing a coded iconography rooted in a lesbian/gay cultural perspective, these images fuse an Asian aesthetic of sparseness and clarity with visual narratives that counteract the “magic-truth rituals” of racial and gender construction.
Her oversized canvases have chronicled many of the populations in which she moves.
Chinn’s inclusion in Harmony Hammond’s “Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History,” the first study of American lesbian visual artists, vastly expanded her national visibility. Her portraits documenting the historical evolution of San Francisco’s queer community challenge the social conventions that currently constitute the racialized order of things.
She is included in Whitney Chadwick’s 5th Edition of “Women, Art and Society” published by Thames & Hudson World of Art, 2012, as well as “Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists” published by Greenwood Press in 2007.
In recent years she has transitioned to using photography to capture images, documenting the cultural landscape from a painter’s perspective. Her lens captures the everyday, ordinary people living their lives, and many of the Bay Area’s arts communities.
She was a Spotlight Photographer for “A Day in the Life of Asian Pacific America,” The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center + Flickr, in 2014.
The artist has been a founding member of Lesbians in the Visual Arts and Queer Cultural Center and is affiliated with the Asian American Women Artists Association.
For more information visit:
www.lenorechinn.com
http://lenorechinn.wordpress.com