AAPI Fund Announces 2025 Creative Catalyst Fellows

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 22, 2025
Contact: Kyung Jin Lee, [email protected]

AAPI Fund Announces 2025 Creative Catalyst Fellows

Projects include animated oral history, interactive museum book, zine-like video game, and a portrait series of historic AAPI environmentalists

LOS ANGELES: The AAPI Civic Engagement Fund (AAPI Fund) announced today the recipients of its Creative Catalyst Fellowship, which awards $240,000 to eight artists, or $30,000 each, to produce interdisciplinary art projects to engage the public in critical issues impacting Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). All of the projects will have a focus on the theme of “Belonging” in mediums both eclectic and traditional, which include a museum book, nonfiction comic, animated oral history, zine-like video game, and portrait series; as well as poetry, hip hop, and documentary.

“Art speaks to us, feels our pain, paints our dreams, and opens our minds in profound new ways,” said EunSook Lee, Co-Executive Director of AAPI Fund, the sponsoring organization of the Creative Catalyst Fellowship. “We are grateful that these phenomenal artists will create work that speaks to the Asian American and Pacific Islander experience today. We’re living in a time of extreme polarization and exclusion, and all of the projects will act as bridges for all of us who call the United States home. Uplifting Asian American and Pacific Islander voices is part of how we advance our vision for a multiracial democracy. We look forward to partnering with these phenomenal artists to strengthen connection and community.”

The eight artists and their projects are:

Roldy Aguero Ablao is a Seattle-based artist, designer, cultural practitioner, and community curator whose work explores Indigenous and immigrant histories, cultural resilience, environmental sustainability, and queer Pacific futurism. They will create a museum book exploring Chamorro and Micronesian art, history, and culture through storytelling and creative expression. Designed for children and adults alike, it will be an interactive journey in the style of art activity books filled with exercises, prompts, and ideas that encourage readers to engage and explore Micronesia in playful and accessible ways.
Nidhi Chanani is an award-winning author and illustrator of more than a dozen books including Pashmina, Jukebox, and Super Boba Cafe; as well as I Will be Fierce, Binny’s Diwali, and Quiet Karima. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and will create a short nonfiction comic that blends personal narrative with the history of the term “Asian American and Pacific Islanders.”
Sargylana Cherepanova is a Siberian Indigenous Sakha interdisciplinary artist and game designer. She will create a short zine-like videogame that reflects the experiences of her community as asylees through stories shared during gathering for Yhyakh, a celebration of summer on solstice.
Singha Hon is a Chinese American visual and teaching artist from New York City, and uses drawing, painting, sculpture, and illustration to explore community, nature, dreams, identity, and the many threads that weave us together. Beginning with Tie Sing, a Chinese American backcountry chef and namesake of Sing Peak in Yosemite, she will create portraits and visual stories about AAPIs who have shaped our history in the environmental and landscape realm.
Craig Santos Perez, an Indigenous Chamoru from Guåhan (Guam), is an ethnic studies professor, poet, and the first Pacific Islander author to receive the American Book Award, Poetry Society of America Award, and National Book Award. He is based in San Diego, California, which has the largest Chamoru diasporic population. Craig will write poetry about belonging among diasporic Chamoru people, guided by inafa’maolek, the belief that all things and beings are related in a kinship.
Katie Quan is a third-generation Chinese American artist, storyteller, and educator born and raised in San Francisco. She explores the complexities of Asian America, addressing themes such as identity, mental health, and family. She will produce a short film, From the Ground Up, which documents the intergenerational dialogue among Asian American artists, historians, and archivists as they preserve decades of movement history and artistic legacy.
Mandeep Sethi, aka SETI X, a South Asian American Sikh hip-hop artist and educator based in Oakland, CA, will produce Roots and Culture, a three-song EP and music video series that explores the complexities of identity, displacement, and home within the South Asian American Sikh experience. The project will blend Punjabi folk elements, boom-bap beats, and contemporary Hip-Hop production to create a sonic bridge between tradition and modern expression.
Tofu Riot, a queer storyteller and animator in Houston, creates experimental, two-dimensional, hand-drawn animations and gender ambiguous, hybrid characters that weave in elements from their life and family. Their project is a 2D animated oral history series that follows five LGBTQ and gender fluid Asian Americans in Texas, illustrating their contributions to their community through organizing, advocacy, and creative expression.

The 2025 Creative Catalyst Fellowship comes at the heels of a successful inaugural Fellowship cohort between 2023 and 2024. Similar art projects supported by the AAPI Fund in the past include The ABCs of AAPI Coloring Book by the Asian American Advocacy Fund in Georgia; the South Asian American Digital Archive’s anthology, Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America; and VietLead’s documentary film, Taking Root, which premiered in June of 2023 at Tribeca Film Festival in Philadelphia.

The Creative Catalyst Fellowship projects are scheduled to be completed by September 2025.

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ABOUT THE AAPI CIVIC ENGAGEMENT FUND

The AAPI Civic Engagement Fund is one of the largest funders of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) movement building organizations and the only one of its kind that focuses investment in state and local organizations doing on-the-ground work. The AAPI Fund’s mission is to foster a culture of civic participation in AAPI communities through grantmaking, building movement capacity, and conducting research. For more info: https://aapifund.org/