Music of Asian America Workshop: No-No Boy

In partnership with Music of Asian America Research Center and University of Pennsylvania Asian American Studies Program, we present the third annual PAAFF Conference.

This year’s three-day conference explores the Music of Asian America through a series of paper presentations and interactive workshops that will run parallel to festival film programming, punctuated by two live musical showcases on Friday and Saturday nights during Opening Weekend.

Bringing together filmmakers, academics, and other creatives – the PAAFF Conference presentations include many of the leading scholars on these subjects and top performing artists in their field. All conference programs are FREE and open to the public, RSVP advised due to limited seating capacity.

Storytelling History & Identity Through Art

Chair:  Michelle Myers (Yellow Rage)
No-No Boy is a multimedia concert performed by Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama, doctoral students at Brown University. The No-No Boy workshop will focus on a close examination of the power of storytelling through recovery and curation of archival imagery, specifically about questions of immigration, identity, incarceration, migration, and refugees across Asian America.

Saporiti and Aoyama, as researchers and artists, will discuss with participants the ways in which they utilize archival visuals to create an added visual dimension to their storytelling and music. The duo will break down their process of combining songwriting, scholarship, and film editing to create their work, inviting participants to think about how the intersection of historical research and personal identity exploration might serve their own art making processes.

Together, we will think about our identities and histories as sources for  storytelling inspiration, exploring the meaning of these two words, “identity” and “history,” and have a conversation about potential work which might come from these personal and historical archives.