Narrating the Asian American Experience

Following a screening of the short film “Dear Corky,” Curtis Chin, director of the film, will be in conversation with Fellow Mae Ngai.

Curtis Chin is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He is author of Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant (2023) and director of Dear Corky (PBS 2024), a short film about the Corky Lee, the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate,” who documented Asian American life and social movements for 50 continuous years, from 1970 to 2021, when he passed away from COVID-19. Chin was a founding member and first executive director of the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York.

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American studies and professor of history at Columbia University and currently a fellow at the Institute for Ideas in Paris. She edited Corky Lee’s Asian America: 50 years of photographic justice (2024), a retrospective collection of Lee’s work; and is author of Impossible Subjects (2004); The Lucky Ones (2010) and The Chinese Question (2021).