The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts and Asian American Arts Alliance announce the 2025 cohort of New York-based artists for the 4th annual Bandung Residency, each selected for their ambitions to foster allyship between Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Black communities. This year’s residency will support 8 participants.
THE 2025 COHORT
Meet the 8 NYC-based artists, educators, change-makers, and organizers who will be exploring and developing projects throughout the summer residency.
JESSICA ANGIMA
Jessica Angima is a first-generation Kenyan-American organizer and social practice artist. In a constant state of process, she facilitates intimate community through the exploration of art, ecology, and contemplative practice.Her work focuses on self-formation; using writing, photography, and dharma to explore the effects of specific places, environments and objects on personal and collective awakening.
With 400+ hours of meditation instruction training, she leads community-engaged art and meditation workshops throughout New York City. She has taught for BRIC, Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Dia Arts Foundation, and more. Jessica was a 2019 Create Change Fellow at The Laundromat Project and a 2023 More Art Engaging Artists Fellow. She holds an MA in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. You can read her writing in Tricycle Magazine, Urban Omnibus, and Syllabus Project, among others. Jessica lives in Brooklyn, NY with her books.
IG: @jessicaangima
PROJECT: Through both one-on-one photo sessions and communal gathering, individuals will be invited to document a significant item from their personal altars. During these photo sessions, participants will also be invited to share the stories and meanings associated with these objects through written or auditory narratives, illuminating the personal and collective significance these items hold. The project will culminate in a public engagement in which Black and AANHPI individuals will be invited to view the growing photo archive documented thus far and participate in the project themselves, having their own altar item documented and added to the archive. Future growth of this project might include a photo exhibition, an accessible website in which the archive can be accessed, and a riso-printed photo book.
CHRISTINE FORBES
Christine Forbes is a multimedia storyteller dedicated to amplifying voices in social justice, health equity, and cultural dialogue. A trained photographer with over seven years of experience producing viral series, she crafts compelling narratives that make nuanced narratives accessible while empowering marginalized communities. Christine has contributed to impactful campaigns on issues such as student debt, disability justice, and gun violence, combining editorial expertise with visual storytelling.
A Jamaican American based in Harlem, Christine’s work often explores the intersections of culture, identity, and community. Her projects blend photography, multimedia journalism, and digital content to celebrate cultural and shared histories. Passionate about justice and healing through storytelling, she engages local voices to foster cross-cultural understanding.
Christine’s portfolio includes collaborations with the Department of Health and Human Services, BuzzFeed, BYRDIE, ESSENCE, Reckon News, and nonprofit organizations like NourishNYC and the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding. She is skilled in content strategy, social media production, and community engagement, with a commitment to creating spaces for dialogue and transformation. Through her storytelling, Christine aims to inspire connection, advocate for equity, and contribute to collective liberation.
PROJECT: “Styling Solidarity” is a multimedia storytelling project that documents the everyday exchanges between Asian-owned beauty supply stores and Black communities in Harlem. Though often overlooked, these stores are cultural exchanges where style, survival, and commerce intersect. The Styling Solidarity project explores how these spaces can foster solidarity through shared beauty practices, mutual aid, and dialogue; especially in the wake of COVID-19, which disproportionately impacted both Black and AANHPI communities.
SABRINA FROMETA
Sabrina Frómeta (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, cacao farmer, filmmaker, and cultural strategist whose work bridges movement, memory, and myth as acts of reclamation and collective healing. Rooted in the Afro-Indigenous landscapes of Quisqueya (Dominican Republic) and raised in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Sabrina’s practice is deeply invested in creating spaces where Black, Indigenous, and Asian diasporas can gather, remember, and reimagine together.
As the founder of YAYA, a creative studio and incubator for regenerative cultural strategy, Sabrina’s work moves fluidly between film, movement rituals, and community-rooted storytelling. Her projects—including Nothin’ But Islands, an experimental movement and storytelling experiment—center cross-cultural dialogue, diasporic solidarity, and the intergenerational transmission of wisdom.Through collaborations with organizations like Lincoln Center, Weeksville Heritage Center, The New School, and land-based communities across the Caribbean, Sabrina continues to explore how art can be a vessel for solidarity, cultural cooperation, and decolonial imagination. Her work honors the belief that our stories are sovereign, and that through collective remembering, we can shape new, liberatory futures. Sabrina holds a Master’s degree in Media Studies from The New School, where she was a Public Engagement Scholar and recipient of the Student Research Award, and was most recently named a 2025 Flaherty Film Fellow.
IG: @fromentation
PROJECT: Nothin’ But Islands is a participatory, multi-sensory movement experiment that invites Black and Asian diasporic communities to co-create speculative geographies of belonging, memory, and solidarity. Rooted in Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous storytelling practices, the project centers on the creation of Yucāley, a mythical island where displaced peoples return to name themselves, craft creature-gods, and reimagine their collective futures.
ZOE FUAD
Zoë Fuad is an Indonesian-American scholar-activist based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s been organizing Black and Southeast Asian (SEA) communities for over four years through her work with ARISE, SEARAC, and several grassroots collectives in NYC, including G-RBLS and MMM Free School. She’s currently working at Miss Major Middle, a soon-to-open school for trans and queer youth in Brooklyn, where she co-develops and leads workshops on the intersections of anti-Blackness, colorism, and transphobia.
She graduated (with honors) from Brown University, holding a degree in Cyberculture and Digital Communities. She’s been awarded the Royce and Community-Based Learning Research Fellowships, in recognition of her multiracial advocacy, and featured in AP News and VICE for racial justice campaigns she’s organized.
As an academic, the majority of her work has been Youth-Participatory Action Research developed with SEA and Black youth. Her essays have appeared in Imbricate’s “Capacities To: Affect Against Fascism.” She’s soon to be published in the Affect Studies journal “Capacious,” as well as Peter Lang’s edited collection, “Television and Sustainability.” She’s also presented papers, at various conferences, on the overlap between SEA animacies, Vodou, and Santeria. Across her organizing, research, and writing, Zoë seeks to restore spiritual practices erased by colonization.
IG: @zoefuad
PROJECT: Focusing on West African, Caribbean and SEA spiritualities in particular, this project will examine the unrecognized links between our diasporic traditions. Through a combination of community dialogues and co-developed workshops, it strives to create strategies for respectfully honoring each others’ ancestral practices, and for responsibly interjecting spiritual practices into movement organizing.
OLLIE HONGJI LI
Ollie focuses on three-dimensional art form, employs knitting and knotting techniques, and works with his home-spun wool and natural-dyed hemp in his textiles. As a sexual minority grew up in China, Ollie is against gender stereotyping and patriarchy. By using his work, Ollie wants to empower people who suffer from patriarchy and speak out for gender equality.
Ollie is a graduate of Parsons school of design (2023) with a Master of Fine Art in Textiles in New York City. He received his BA in 2019 from the University of Southampton (England) in Printed textiles design. He is also a textile designer. In 2023 Ollie was honored Creative Promise Award from Surface Design Association for his outstanding textiles artwork, he is also the finalist of Dorothy Waxman international Textiles Design Prize.
PROJECT: “Unraveling Power: Threads of Solidarity,” is a community-driven textile installation that explores the shared experiences of AANHPI and Black communities in resisting patriarchy, colonialism, and gender-based oppression. The work will consist of large-scale, hand-crafted sculptures made from natural-dyed fibers and repurposed materials like electric wires—symbolizing institutional power—and will incorporate techniques such as knotting, crocheting, and spinning. These sculptures will represent hybrid deities and gender-fluid forms, inspired by both Eastern and African diasporic mythologies, as a way to reimagine power structures and honor non-binary narratives.
NADINE NELSON
Nadine Nelson is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and social practitioner whose work explores cultural preservation, justice, and collective healing through participatory art. Born in Toronto and of Jamaican heritage, Nelson draws on her lived experiences and global perspective to create immersive, community-based projects that activate public spaces and challenge dominant narratives.Her work spans installation, social practice, and culinary arts—often blurring the lines between art and everyday life. As the founder of Global Local Gourmet and Master Cooks Corps, she has designed interactive experiences that blend storytelling, education, and cultural exchange. Her projects—such as Public Kitchen, Stir the Pot, Harvest Mandalas, Channeling Oshun, and Yemaya’s Ocean Blossoms—have been presented at institutions like ArtSpace, the Design Studio for Social Intervention, Hygienic Art, and the Institute Library.
Nelson has been awarded fellowships from the Laundromat Project, National Arts Strategies, Project Row Houses, Van Alen Institute, and the New Haven Artist Corps. Her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, Eater, Vice, and Yes! Magazine. With deep roots in education and community organizing, Nelson’s socially engaged practice consistently aims to build spaces for joy, resistance, and reimagination—centering Black, diasporic, and cross-cultural narratives as vital to envisioning equitable futures.
PROJECT: Through food and healing practices, we’ll engage community members across NYC neighborhoods in experiences that illuminate these connections. Elders, home cooks, and cultural knowledge-keepers will lead gatherings where participants share traditional recipes, cooking techniques, and medicinal plant wisdom. We’ll explore the African and Asian food pyramids, discussing how our ancestral diets offer pathways to wellness and sovereignty. The project challenges divisive narratives that have historically pitted our communities against each other while affirming our shared commitments to cultural preservation and collective liberation.
DARIUS PHELPS
Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is a poet, writer, and scholar whose work centers the liberatory possibilities of poetic inquiry, culturally responsive pedagogy, and critical literacy. A former elementary school teacher and now professor, he mentors pre-service educators in reimagining classrooms as spaces of resistance, restoration, and radical love. His scholarship amplifies the voices of historically marginalized students, exploring how poetry can serve as both pedagogy and prophecy. Drawing inspiration from Black literary traditions, personal narrative, and student testimony, Darius uses his own poetry to foster healing, identity reclamation, and joy in the margins. His work has been featured by NCTE, School Library Journal,and many others where he continues to advocate for education that honors everybody, every story, and every voice.
IG: @dr.dphelps
PROJECT: Embracing Every Hue is a healing-centered, collaborative poetry initiative designed to bring together Black and AANHPI youth across New York City to write, share, and reimagine their narratives in community. At its core, this project is about visibility, connection, and reclamation—centering young voices who have too often been spoken for, overlooked, or erased.
MANGDA SENGVANHPHENG
Mangda Sengvanhpheng was born with a Lao name that means the light of the full moon. They create under this light—where the living meet the dead, where they remember what we were never taught: that grief and death are not problems, but portals to understanding.As an artist and a death doula, their work lives in the in-between. They create ritual-based paintings, communal installations, and socially engaged grief care. Their work is rooted in ancestral practices and shaped by contemporary experiences of loss, memory, and resistance. Each piece is an offering—crafted with paint, texture, nature, and string—to touch what cannot be touched – mourning, emotion, and the unseen.
In 2018, Mangda accompanied their mother through her death, which gave birth to BACII, their care project inspired by Lao ceremonies that reunite the soul. Launched days before the pandemic, BACII disrupts Western death avoidance and offers ritual and beauty as forms of collective healing.
IG: @mangxseng
PROJECT: This series begins with community conversations led by Black and AANHPI thought leaders, activists, and artists from diverse perspectives who have transformed grief and systemic hardship into service for their respective communities. Building from these discussions, creative and healing grief gatherings will be offered with meditation, somatic movement, sound, writing, art-making and cross-cultural storytelling. Participants’ contributions will be invited to contribute to a community zine. Through guided reflections, we’ll explore what it means to become a future ancestor, and how impermanence can serve as a pathway to dream new futures. The altar will be composed of participant-created artworks, symbolic offerings, and ancestral materials like incense, cultural foods, and ritual objects.
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
The Bandung Residency is an opportunity designed to uplift the work of organizers, artists, educators, and way-makers whose practice is intended to foster solidarity between Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander (AAPI) and Black communities.
Inspired by recent events that have deeply impacted these communities, as well as the Stop Asian Hate and Black Lives Matter movements, this program takes cue from the first large-scale Asian–African or Afro–Asian Conference, also known as the Bandung Conference, which took place in 1955 in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. The groundbreaking summit, which hosted leaders from 29 newly independent Asian and African states emerging from colonial rule (representing a total population of 1.5 billion people, 54% of the world’s population at the time), signaled a pivotal juncture between these communities to discuss peace, equality, and mutual respect for sovereignty, political self-determination, cultural cooperation, human rights, the role of the Global South (then known as the Third World), economic development, and decolonization. Building upon the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as identified the previous year by leaders from China and India, the primary objectives of the Bandung Conference ‘55 cohort were “a call for an end to racial discrimination wherever it occurred, and a reiteration of the importance of peaceful coexistence…and collaboration.”
Similarly, The Bandung Residency aims to cultivate a dynamic safe space for a diverse cohort of changemakers interested in engaging in social justice discourse, restorative healing, cultural placemaking, expanding the narrative between communities, and cross-community allyship, whether participating in the program for their personal transformation, in service to the communities identified, or both.
In 2021, Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA) launched the Bandung Residency for creatives interested in engaging in social justice discourse, restorative healing, place-based cultural practices, expanding the narrative and deepening understanding between communities, and more. This book is an introspective journey through the development of the residency program, and an advocacy manual for change makers interested in solidarity work. Explore learned best practices as well as the projects realized by residents from the first two Bandung Residency cohorts, with additional contributions from residents who participated in a pilot extension cohort.
Your purchase of this book will enable The Bandung Residency to thrive!
EVENTS
Mark your calendars! Here’s our list of upcoming Bandung Residency special event dates that are open to the public.
LIVE COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS
As part of the Bandung Residency, A4 and MoCADA present a series of discussions with community leaders who offered insights into their practice as makers, organizers, activists and educators.
PREVIOUS PRESENTATIONS
PARTNERS
The Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring greater representation, equity, and opportunities for Asian American artists and cultural organizations through resource sharing, promotion, and community building. Since 1983, A4 has sought to unify, promote, and represent the artistic and cultural producers of one of New York City’s fastest-growing populations. We are a diverse alliance of artists, organizations, and arts supporters who believe that working together as a pan-ethnic, multidisciplinary community is essential to nurturing the development of artists and arts groups. A4 serves as a thoughtful convener of the Asian American cultural workforce around issues of race, identity, and artmaking and provides a critical voice for this community. We are the only service organization in the country dedicated to the professional development of Asian American and Pacific Islander artists in all disciplines.
The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA) was born from the graduate thesis of our founder Laurie Cumbo on the feasibility of an African art museum contributing to the revitalization of its neighboring Black communities. Twenty years later, our mission has grown through three programmatic arms – Exhibitions, Education, and Community – that use art as a vehicle for social change via the celebration of Africa and the diaspora. Through artistic presentations, community conversations, creative expression, interactive learning, and cultural preservation, we amplify “voices” that are central to the upliftment of Black lives, and advocate for equity and access on every level. We reach beyond the walls of our physical museum space to deliver dynamic arts, educational, and social justice programs, including 60+ exhibitions, 500+ public programs, conversations, community gatherings, healing circles, learning opportunities and more in the gallery, the street, parks, schools, public housing and beyond. “More than a museum”, MoCADA has become a critical tool for welcoming those who are systematically left out, and a safe space for engaging with people across social divides.
This residency is made possible thanks to generous gifts from the New York City Council’s AAPI Community Support Initiative, the Ford Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Apicha Community Health Center, and the Department of Youth and Community Development.
