Artist/Activist Fellowship 2025

Asian Arts Initiative's Artist/Activist Fellowship supports artists and collectives who work at the intersection between artistic practice and social activism. Focusing on relationship building as a process, rather than producing a final product, the Fellows will develop their projects in dialogue with AAI staff, with one another, and with community members during the course of the fellowship, which will allow for an ongoing exchange among collaborators. The Fellows will present a series of workshops and community gatherings through this Spring to share their projects with the public.

Meet our Artist/Activist 2025 Fellows: Lauren Lowe and Memory Workers' Guild!

Memory Workers' Guild (MWG)

MWG is partnering with Asian Arts Initiative for the 2nd iteration of Memory Work Labs, a series of collective learning spaces framed by guild members to exchange ideas, organize around our labor experiences, and build on our personal creative toolkits.

How can the skills of cultural production guide us to becoming more organized communally and re-engaged towards a shared power and support network? This question is central to our work as we aim to develop in the realms of labor and cultural organizing and connects us to the historic frameworks of diasporic solidarities amongst colonized peoples.

Learn about MWG's workshop dates & Reserve tickets!

Lauren Lowe (LL)

LL is a queer writer and teaching artist with family roots in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. They will present their work in bringing together members of Chinatown and West Philly (Mantua & West Poweltown) affected by the No Arena campaign, and Drexel’s expansion. The workshops will take place in each neighborhood (Chinatown and West Philly), then a culminating workshop will be held at Asian Arts Initiative. Workshop dates TBD. Stay tuned for updates.

Lauren Lowe

Lauren Lowe (she/they) also goes by LL. A queer writer and teaching artist with family roots in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, she is working on a nonfiction book about the gentrification she’s witnessed in the city—drawing contrasts and parallels between her experiences working in West Philadelphia with the history of Chinatown and her father’s involvement in political resistance to city planning decisions in the 1970s. Lately, LL has been organizing with the Save Chinatown Coalition, teaching courses at Writers Room on storytelling for social change, and coaching girls’ basketball with the Philadelphia Suns.

Memory Workers' Guild

Website

The Memory Workers’ Guild (MWG) exists to create a better present and future for the legacies of Black cultural workers that are often buried behind the nature of our care. While members engage in cross-cultural work in solidarity with all oppressed groups, we center Black, queer, and femme perspectives as both clarifying principles and protective boundaries against the anti-Black racial, sexual, cis-hetero, and class violence that appears all too regularly in our lines of work.

Whether in museums, schools, community centers, non-profits, neighborhoods, and otherwise, there’s a bitter irony many of us have experienced that our deep care for cultural preservation has led to a dismissal of our needs by institutional powers and sometimes even ourselves. In the case of the former, MWG serves as a platform to leverage a collective effort against these painful dismissals, a potential to fight together against our shared working grievances. In the case of the latter, MWG serves as a home base for the replenishment of our tools of care, joy, culture, and energy.