Anne Ishii to Depart Organization After Six Years of Leadership Through Pandemic Years

July 23, 2024 | Philadelphia, PA—After six years of serving Asian Arts Initiative (AAI) as its executive director, Anne Ishii will be leaving the North Chinatown-based arts organization on August 15, 2024. AAI was founded in 1993 by Gayle Isa as a Black and Asian poetry coalition in response to the national social unrest following the Rodney King trial. The resolution of this work continues to compel the organization, and will animate its programming and services through the coming years.

Ishii will stay on as a part-time consultant to oversee music programming and the SOUND TYPE festival, which culminates in November. Director of Programs Dave Kyu will be deputized as interim director following Ishii’s formal departure, and will brook the transition of the organization as it looks forward to new permanent leadership in 2025. An executive search process will begin imminently.

Kyu comes into interim leadership at AAI after a long relationship with the organization that begins with his tenure as a Social Practice Lab artist-in-residence in the 2010s. Kyu’s background in Philadelphia city works and experience leading AAI’s 2017 cultural plan (People:Power:Place) make him a natural steward for the organization’s mission to build community through the power of art. Kyu understands that making material change in the neighborhood through cultural affect is a generational project.

The board, led by chair Tuan Nguyen, is in total unison in its enthusiasm and confidence in the staff and its leadership, looking forward to seamless transitions through the coming year. Ishii leaves an organization in a tremendous state of fiscal and structural health, mutually buoyed by neighbors, constituents, artists and caregivers.

Interim Director Kyu will be joined by Managing Director Matt Nelson in executive oversight, and will be supported by a directors suite that now includes a newly designed role of Director of Marketing filled by Jeanette Lloyd, previously of the Village of Arts and Humanities. Key updates in the staff also include the promotion of Dominique Chua to Programs Coordinator, Daniela Galindo to Lead Teaching Artist (which also speaks to the expansion of AAI’s education programs), and longtime designer to AAI Jino Lee is now its Brand and Publicity Director. 

Ishii’s stated vision was always to protect pathways for artists of color to create more brave art in Philadelphia, and the tremendous headway AAI has made in structuring equitable resource distribution to its own staff as well as to constituent partners and neighbors, is a major victory as only community led arts initiatives can accomplish. The organization’s newly assumed stewardship of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s regional regranting program, The Velocity Fund, speaks to its growing capacity as a fiscal sponsor and AAI’s role in building power for the newly reinitiated People:Power:Place Award is a strong indication of its holding power.

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