The Bay Area's Hub for Asian Pacific American Community Arts Since 1972

Layla .A. is a 22 year old indlie/alternative singer songwriter from San Jose, CA looking to expand her music throughout the Bay Area and more. 

Jeremy Keith Villaluz is a photographer based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. As a photographer working in the realms of documentary and landscape, his work explores divergent narratives in the everyday that are often overlooked or left in the margins. With a background in Ethnic Studies, the paradigm his work deals with is largely informed by his time in the community and classroom, particularly as educator dealing with Filipino American community issues.

San Francisco based artist and designer Sasha Vu graduated with a BFA in Communications Design and Illustration from Brooklyn's Pratt institute in 2013. She studied 2D and 3D design, lighting, photography and illustration. Blending the macabre, surreal and beautiful ; Sasha creates images, spaces and objects that transport the viewer. Her art serves as a portal for the imagination and realms beyond.

Leslie Samson-Tabakin is a visual artist working in printmaking, drawing, painting, and installation. She was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaii, and is currently an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally at galleries in Hilo, Honolulu, San Francisco, St Louis, and Massachusetts. She is the 2016 recipient of the SF State Fellowship/ Artist in Residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, as well as the Martin Wong Scholarship in Painting.

Paolo Salazar, Artist and Educator, is a transplant from Baguio City, Philippines. In 2005, he earned a BFA from San Francisco State University with a Dual Emphasis in Art History and Painting. His artwork has been shown in various spaces, including the Fine Art Museum of San Francisco – Legion of Honor, Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, the San Francisco Museum Historical Society at The Old Mint, and at the Pistahan Festival.

Maia Paroginog was born in the Philippines and raised in Washington state. They received a B.A. in Studio Art with Honors from Stanford University in June 2016. Maia’s work reflects the transitive nature of diasporic movement through the manipulation of material and painterly process.

Topher Maka is a Filipino-American painter living in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. Maka focuses largely on water-based painting and installations that act as consequences to current structural society and intends to impose a mutation. The jarring truths of his work are found in self-actualization and realization of given complex environments.

Mariela Montero was born in Honolulu, raised in both Washington state and in the Bay Area, and currently lives and works in San Francisco. Her practice draws upon her background as a Filipina American woman and explores these intersections through the lens of post­colonial theory. She is currently working on her MFA degree at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Sarah Lee is a first-generation Korean American. She embraces ideas of cultural hybridity, and plays with multiple themes of cross-pollination and blending in her work. She is a painter and a sculptor, who depicts these themes in the form of narratives, using animals as symbols of humans to echo the voices of the women, minority groups, and people of color, to reveal their shared histories.

Colin Kimzey is a San Francisco native studying Art Practice at Stanford University. He is the recipient of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts' Summer 2016 Community Arts Fellowship, through which he is serving as an intern and archivist at Kearny Street Workshop. His art practice incorporates his activism and organizing around housing rights, labor, ethnic studies, and justice and self determination for people of color in the Bay Area.

Guoveng Cheng is a Chinese ­American multimedia artist based in San Francisco. He was born in Macau and immigrated with family to the US when he was 12. He received his BA from UC Berkeley. Cheng examines societal issues in his work and deals with issues such as minority mental health and Asian American identity. His current project is a visual memoir about coping with unresolved grief over a loved one with serious mental illness.

Kunlin He was born in NanChang, China and currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He received his BFA in Architecture Design at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2014 and recently received his MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. He has showcased his work in various exhibitions all over San Francisco.

Tina Kashiwagi was born in Canoga Park, California in 1993. At the age of two, she and her family moved to the Bay Area where she grew up in San Jose, California. She attended San Francisco State University and graduated with a BFA. Her work explores the idea of alternate realities, absurdity and existentialism.