Join us to honor and celebrate the achievements, cultures, and innovations of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
Learn more about KID Museum’s Community Celebrations and our commitment to diversifying STEM.
Event Details
Hok San Lion Dance
11 - 11:40 AM | Big Build
KID Museum is excited to welcome our friends in The East Rising Lion Dance Troupe for another fantastic performance. Enjoy the majesty of this traditional dance and join the parade as the lion brings good luck, happiness, and prosperity to all.
The East Rising Lion Dance Troupe has been performing in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area for over 15 years. You can learn more about which Chinese folk tales may have inspired the Lion Dance here.
Taiwanese Shadow Puppets
10 AM - 4 PM | Central Makerspace
Explore the magical art of Taiwanese shadow puppets! Watch and learn as our friends from Taiwan Fun demonstrate this playful tradition, then build your own characters and test them out.
Puppet Shows: 10:30 AM, 12:30 PM, & 2:30 PM
Taiwan Fun preserves and showcases Taiwanese culture through multicultural festivals and events.
Game Makers & Culture Creators
1 - 3:30 PM | Maker Lounge
Meet Asian American and Pacific Islander middle and high school student designers, historians, and community leaders while playing and making your own board games.
Asian American Youth Leadership Empowerment And Development was founded in 1998 to support Vietnamese refugees in the Washington, D.C. area. Since then, AALEAD’s unique focus on providing identity development, educational empowerment, and leadership opportunities has allowed them to reach thousands of low-income and under-served Asian American and Pacific Islander youths in the region.
Tell Your Story: Zine Workshop
10 AM - 4 PM | Central Makerspace
Join artist Julie Wu of the SAMASAMA art collective for an afternoon of hands-on fun! Illustrate, design, and craft your own zines – short for mini magazines – to tell a story that’s all your own.
“Sama-sama” is Tagalog for “all together.” This local art collective was originally founded to put on a single show, but when curator Seda Nak realized how many people wanted to tell their stories, SAMASAMA began to grow. Today, SAMASAMA curates year-round programs and events celebrating the beautiful nuances of diaspora.
Meet A Maker: Adele 이슬 Kenworthy
1 - 4 PM | Tech Lab
Collaborating on making art can help us keep our memories safe and remember the care we give and receive. Join artist Adele 이슬 Kenworthy to make clay persimmons and personal recordings honoring your most special memories. She’ll help you shape clay, record messages, and share your creations!
Adele Yiseol Kenworthy (she/they) is a 1.5-generation Korean-American artist-organizer and a friend of KID Museum. Their work centers community, resilience, and the process of making memories.
Meet A Maker: Trisha Gupta
10 AM - 12:30 PM | Central Makerspace
KID Museum’s 2023 Visiting Artist Trisha Gupta returns! Meet Trisha, learn about the tradition of woodblock printing in India, and use hand-carved stamps to print your own artworks.
Contemporary artist, community activist, and educator Trisha Gupta runs a community studio and print shop in Burtonsville, Maryland. She takes inspiration from distinctly Indian color palettes, medical diagrams, and “hidden experiences narrated by people outside the bell curve” like herself.
Mechanical Puppets
10 AM - 4 PM | Cardboard Studio
How does the Lion Dance puppet work?
Explore the inside of the East Rising Lion Dance Troupe’s Lion Head! Check out the full-size pulleys, hinges, and joints that make it sway and roar. Then, make your own movable puppet!
Prefer shadow puppets? Make your own with sheets of cellophane!
Light Up the Mangrove!
10 AM - 4 PM | Electronics Studio
Our educators made a decorative mangrove tree, but it’s missing something. Can you help us light it up with Chibitronics Chibi Lights Stickers?
Join Chibitronics Education Ambassador Barbara Leihdal to code and construct your own designs atop KID’s latest sculpture. Jie Qi’s “cute electronics” make engineering easy for all!
Papermaking
10 AM - 4 PM | Materials Bar
Have you ever wondered about the history of paper?
What we now call paper was originally invented in mainland China thousands of years ago. Over time, this super-useful technology spread all across Asia! Try making your own paper using traditional methods, from blending pulp to molding decorative sheets you can take home.
Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander #HistoryMakers
KID Museum #HistoryMakers are people whose invention, innovation, or impact inspires us. We celebrate these incredible individuals as part of our larger mission to diversify STEM and maker communities.
Whenever possible, we strive to partner with local #HistoryMakers for on-site appearances. These #HistoryMakers will be marked in orange.
After experiencing mental health struggles in her youth, first-generation Indian-American Trisha Gupta decided to pursue occupational therapy to help others "outside the bell curve." But even in the medical field, she found inequalities. Halfway through her degree, Trisha began making art to express the stories she was hearing outside of a medical context. She returned to Ahmedabad to learn the traditional Indian arts of woodblock carving and dye-making. Since then, Trisha has been making large-scale prints and installations inspired by her patients, her home, and her medical studies, including a 2023 installation for KID Museum's Visiting Artist program. She also runs a community studio and print shop in Burtonsville, MD.
Trisha Gupta
Artist, Activist, & Educator
What could the future look like on an Earth without humans? Through the use of theatrical elements Phaan Howng creates paintings and immersive installations around that very idea, encouraging viewers to reflect on current ecological conditions and their role in creating them. Having received her Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art, her vibrant artwork is grounded by research into landscape theory, anthropology, and history. She has presented solo exhibitions at museums including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and MoCA Arlington, and her work has been featured in publications ranging from her local paper, the Baltimore Sun, all the way to The New York Times T List. Most recently, she contributed her art to a live orchid installation in the courtyard at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art called “The Future of Orchids.”
Phaan Howng
Artist
Adele Yiseol Kenworthy is a first generation Korean American artist-organizer whose superpower is vulnerability. As a graduate of the inaugural cohort of the Master of the Fine Arts in Social Practice Art at the Corcoran School of Art and Design, Adele sees their artistic practice as a reimagining of heritage work, similar to tending a garden of cultural memory. In her work, she often explores how flowers have dyed, draped, and nourished social movements. Adele has exhibited at Transformer Gallery, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Brentwood Arts Exchange, The Fearless Artist Pop up Gallery at Art Basel Miami, Gallery 102 at George Washington University, and NEXT (2022) Festival at the Corcoran School of Art and Design. They have also been included in the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art’s “We Should Talk” exhibit.
Adele 이슬 Kenworthy
Socially Engaged Artist-Organizer
Growing up on a farm in India, Dr. Rajan Natarajan never believed he would be where he is today, as Founding Chairman and CEO of Global Alliant, Inc., an information technology and software development firm. Dr. Rajan, who specializes in bioscience, has published his research more than 50 times, filed a U.S. patent for a new invention, and served in multiple roles in the Maryland state government, including Deputy Secretary of State for Policy and External Affairs. In addition to his Ph.D. in Biotechnology, he holds two masters degrees in Biosciences from the University of Madras, India, and a Master of Business Administration from Michigan State University. Recently, he founded The Natarajan Family Scholarship to support underprivileged high school students pursuing degrees in STEM. The motto behind all of his work is “Listen, Learn, and Lead.”
Dr. Rajan Natarajan
Scientist, Entrepreneur, & CEO of Global Alliant, Inc.
Since 2021, members and allies of the AAPI community have banded together around the #StopAsianHate movement ignited by a video produced by activist Amanda Nguyen. She called on media organizations to report the 150% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes following the Covid-19 pandemic, and, by using her voice, she has inspired others to take to the streets. Amanda’s activism has always focused on the intersection of race and gender. In 2014, she founded Rise, a civil rights organization that helped pass the Sexual Assault Survivor’s Rights Act through congress. She chose the name Rise to “remind us that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can rise up and change the world.”
Amanda Nguyen
Entrepreneur, Activist, & CEO of Rise
Jie Qi is an artist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Her mission is to combine art with engineering to create experiences of wonder, and empower creators of all backgrounds to make their own expressive and personally meaningful technologies. She is co-founder and CEO of Chibitronics, a company that produces creative learning toolkits for paper circuits. As a 2017 fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard University Law school, Jie created PatentPandas.org, a resource to teach patent law through friendly panda comics, share real life inventors’ stories, and connect independent creators to free legal counsel. Jie holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from the MIT Media Lab. Her work has been exhibited at the Exploratorium Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Jie Qi*
Founder of Chibitronics
*Chibitronics are available at KID Museum from 3/9 until 6/1. Chibitronics Education Ambassador Barbara Liedahl will visit on May 18. Jie will not be in person.
Donny Trương has been designing and developing web experiences for twenty years. For his final graduate thesis at George Mason University School of Art, he wrote “Vietnamese Typography” – a book that has quickly become an essential guide for designing Vietnamese diacritics, the markings that help readers to distinguish pronunciation between letters, like accent marks (é, ö, ú) or cedillas (ç, ʂ). You can even see two of them in Donny’s last name. Type designers around the world have used Donny’s work as a guide to help them understand the unique typographic features in Vietnamese, learning the subtle details and the nuances of the Vietnamese writing system, helping improve the readability of Vietnamese text on screens.
Donny Trương
Designer, Web Developer, & Creative
Ever want to blend in and not be noticed? That's how Alice Wong felt growing up as one of very few Asian American students and one of the very few who were physically disabled in her school. Alice felt that she stuck out in undesirable ways and struggled with internalized racism and the desire to blend in. When she was in her twenties, Alice started to fight for access and visibility on her own terms. Working to enact systemic change, she began to conduct research and provide assistance to others with disabilities, and in 2013, was appointed by President Obama to the National Council on Disability. In 2014, she launched the Disability Visibility Project to elevate the voices and stories of disabled people, “I want to create a world that is reflective of all of us. This is my life’s work.”
Alice Wong
Disabled Activist, Writer, Editor, & Community Organizer
Dr. Nicole Yamase has had a lot of firsts: in 2021, she was the first Polynesian person to visit the bottom of the Marianas Trench; in 2022, she became the first citizen of the Federated States of Micronesia to earn a doctorate in marine biology. In her youth, Nicole's family moved around so frequently that she describes herself as a "child of the Islands," considering the entire Pacific to be her home. These first-hand experiences with the ocean's various environments led her to pursue marine biology and conservation ecology. Despite Micronesia occupying nearly 1.2 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, including the Marianas Trench, discrimination against Pacific Islanders has kept millions of people from following their dreams. Nicole hopes to change that. As the Director of Impact at OneReef, she works to bring traditional knowledge into conversation with science and to further the presence of Pacific Islanders in marine sciences.
Dr. Nicole Yamase
Marine Biologist, Ocean Explorer, & Director of Impact at OneReef
Access for Every Maker
KID Museum is dedicated to expanding access to STEM and maker learning opportunities for all by providing free and reduced-cost opportunities to participate in our programming.
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