Our Team

 

Les Talusan
Batang Kankaloo

Les Talusan is a DJ, photographer, curator, teaching artist, and organizer whose practice immerses people in the joy of community-powered discovery. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, and now based in Washington, DC for over 20 years, Les continues to find inspiration behind the decks in the U.S. and abroad. Fueled by their own story of resilience, liberation, and courage as an immigrant, parent and survivor, Les brings to the center the songs long cherished, remembered, and celebrated by people of the global diaspora.

Les is also the co-founder and co-curator of SAMASAMA Art Show & Gathering, and the co-founder of Sampaguita Rock Camp for Filipinx Girls, and she volunteers both her skill sets to Girls Rock! DC as a DJ instructor and band photographer.

Seda Nak
Foreign National

Seda Nak is a co-founder of Foreign National hospitality group, creating unique, cultural experiences through food. Under Foreign National, she is the creator and owner of specialty retail and community brick-and-mortars, Hometown and Shopkeepers. She is a believer of independent businesses organically leading conversations surrounding cultural diversity through conceptual spaces.

Seda is also a co-creator of The Color Curtain Project, an artist book and culinary project influenced by Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain, A Report on the Bandung Conference, in 1955. The Color Curtain Project reflects on the meaning of Afro-Asian solidarity and community. Through food and company, Afro-Asian intersectionality are the centric point-of-view, a form of performance art within itself. 

As a child of Cambodian refugees, she is one of many brilliantly complicated and misunderstood people exhausted of the ignorance surrounding the Asian demographic.

Michelle Chen

Michelle Shiyu Chen is a muralist and calligrapher based in Washington, DC. Her early training in Chinese calligraphy informs her handling of brush and spray can to evoke the expressive economy of that tradition. In creating her work, she investigates stories, new and inherited, that we weave to build realities of self, community, and culture. As an independent artist, she has created murals in the DC area, Belgium, and Taiwan.

Thu Nguyen

Nguyễn Anh Thư (or Thu like two for short) is a native Houstonian learning and shaping what advocacy, human information design, and entrepreneurship can mean, based in Washington, DC and Houston, TX.

You can find her doing one or multiple of the following at any given time, but they all intersect somehow with Asian American and Pacific Islander advocacy, ethnography, food, design, or fashion.

Kam & 46

Vanessa and Elaine are Kam and 46, Fil-Ams from Hawaii and California who were raised in an immigrant household. Kam and 46 is an ode to the homes we grew up in where we learned our culture. Being away from home, we always appreciate and carry our values, customs, and traditions. Sharing the food we grew up with embodies this spirit and is an extension of sharing a piece of us and our home.

Oscar Olmedo

Oscar Olmedo is a Scientist by training and has studied many subjects in Physics. By day, Oscar works as a Data Scientist crunching data, and in his spare time enjoys many artistic pursuits. Most notably he enjoys sewing and fashion design, music, photography, and telescope making. He is a student of Son Jarocho, playing Requinto with Son La Lucha. Most recently he has started developing film in his makeshift basement darkroom. He is most passionate about sewing and enjoys making well fitted tailoring clothing, something he stared doing at an early age.

Ejaz Baluch

Ejaz is a civil rights attorney based in Washington, DC. He is passionate about civil rights and racial justice. Ejaz helps enforce federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination as an attorney with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He is also passionate about advancing the civil rights of AA and NHPI communities, and he completed a six-month detail with the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. A former teacher, Ejaz believes that in addition to the law, literature and affinity group spaces can create communities that promote racial justice. Ejaz helps lead SAMASAMA’s book club, which meets quarterly to talk about books written by diaspora authors.

Julie Wu

Bio coming!

Shani Shih

Shani Shih is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Washington DC. With painting, illustration, and street art as her primary mediums, her work features bold linework, gritty textures, and expressive human figures intertwined with industrial structures and natural scenes. Through her creations she aims to represent everyday social and bodily experience in the modern world, communicating shared human experiences of suffering, endurance, and hope.