The Past is Present

Anocha Suwichakornpong, Associate Professor of Film at the School of the Arts, is an independent filmmaker who lives and works in Bangkok and the U.S. Her films have been screened at festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, Berlin, Locarno, and Rotterdam. Anocha’s work, informed by the socio-political history of Thailand, has received much international critical acclaim and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York and TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto. She founded the Bangkok-based production company, Electric Eel Films, to nurture works by emerging talents from Thailand and abroad, and co-founded Purin Pictures, a film fund that supports and promotes independent Southeast Asian cinema. Anocha is a 2019 Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Program recipient. She has taught filmmaking at Harvard University, Mahidol University, and in the fall of 2022, Anocha joined the MFA film program at Columbia University as a film directing faculty.

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history at Columbia. Major publications include Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). She writes commentary on immigration and Asian American issues for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications. While at the Institute, Ngai will be working on A Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea, a book based on the Lawrence Stone lectures delivered at Princeton University. An intellectual and political history of the American liberal narrative of inclusion from the Cold War to 1980, it addresses major tropes such as “nation of immigrants,” “American Dream,” and “Land of Refuge,” showing how they are products of history and not timeless national ideals.