Clare Counihan earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her B.A. in English Literature from Duke University. Her research focuses on contemporary southern African experimental literature and the relationship between narrative form and national belonging for unbeloved subjects. She is also deeply interested in food: eating it, cooking it, understanding the ways it reflects and mediates our identities and interactions.

Sarita Echavez See was born in New York City but raised as an "embassy brat" moving from city to city around the world. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she first became involved with U.S. women of color politics, especially the arts and culture movement. She obtained her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. While studying in New York City, she met the Filipino American artists and writers who inspired and continue to inspire her teaching and scholarship. In 2013, she joined the faculty of the University of California, Riverside, where she is an associate professor of Media and Cultural Studies. She previously taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American and Filipino American cultural critique, postcolonial and empire studies, narrative, and theories of gender and sexuality. She is the author of the book-length study The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), in which she argues that contemporary Filipino American forms of aesthetic and performative abstraction powerfully expose and indict the history of American imperialism as itself a form of abstraction. She is at work on the book-length project “Against Accumulation,” which is a study of the politics of accumulation in the American museum and university and of the politics of anti-accumulation in Filipino American theatre, writing, and visual art. She was one of the core organizers of the 2011 conference "Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide" held at the University of California, Riverside, and she has served as a member of the working board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association. In her work with the Center for Art and Thought and its focus on the contemporary medium of the digital, she envisions CA+T to be a transnational venue for more meaningful, reciprocal encounters between artists and scholars, and she is committed to fostering new forms of literacy, rather than tutelage, and to the transformation, rather than the mere transmission and replication, of knowledge.

Wawi Navarroza is a photographer/multi-disciplinary artist from Manila, Philippines. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from De La Salle University, Manila and attended continuing education at the International Center of Photography, New York. Recently, Navarroza completed her scholarship at the Istituto Europeo di Design, Madrid under the program European Master of Fine Art Photography.

Her work with contemporary photography has taken shape in highly-stylized symbolic mise-en-scène and tableau vivants, shifting to her more recent interest in landscape, constructed still life, and installation. Her landscape photographs propose a familiar 'other place' that opens up to fabricated emotional space that seems to be carved out by both personal and collective memory and amnesia.

Navarroza has exhibited widely in the Philippines and internationally. She has participated at the 2012 Tokyo Month of Photography, presented by Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Asian Art Biennale, in Taichung, Taiwan (2011); the annual touring exhibition "CUT: New Photography from South East Asia," by Valentine Willie Fine Art (VWFA) Kuala Lumpur; ASEAN-Korea’s "Emerging Wave" Asian Contemporary Photography Exhibition in Seoul, Korea (2010); and "Verso Manila: contemporary art from the Philippines" in Turin, Italy (2009). She has also been shown at Angkor Photography Festival Cambodia, Noorderlicht Photography Festival Holland, and PhotoIreland.

Recent solo exhibits include "ULTRAMAR, Pt.1: Gathered Throng, Falling Into Place" (2012) and "Dominion" (2011), at Silverlens Gallery, Manila, and "On Landscapes and Some Dislocations" at Galería Patrick Domken, Cadaqués, Spain. She has received a number of awards, such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines' Thirteen Artists Awards Triennial (2012), Lumi Photographic Art Awards, Helsinki (2011), and she was a finalist for the prestigious Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2011) and Singapore Museum Signature Art Prize (2011). Other awards include International Photography Awards (2010), Portfolio Preis (2010, Germany), and Prix de la Photographie Paris (2009). She has staged two award-winning solo exhibitions: “POLYSACCHARIDE: The Dollhouse Drama” (2005) and “SATURNINE: A Collection of Portraits, Creatures, Glass, and Shadow” (2007), which was cited Winner at the Ateneo Art Awards 2007, Philippines. In 2009, Navarroza was awarded the first Asian Cultural Council-Silverlens Fellowship Grant to further her research and practice in New York City.

Her work has been shown in institutions such as the National Museum of the Philippines, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery, Hangaram Museum, Korea, National Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan, and Fries Museum of Contemporary Art, Netherlands.

Navarroza has also worked as a lecturer of photography at De La Salle University and as an independent curator. She also sings for a post-punk rock band called The Late Isabel. In the past few years she has based herself in Madrid, Barcelona and Cadaqués, Spain. Currently, Navarroza is working and living in Manila, Philippines.

Photograph by Gabby Cantero.

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Though visual, his art revolves largely around language. Directly informed by historic events, material significance, and the format of jokes, his subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.

Michael has a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Cue Arts Foundation, and the Asia Society in New York among many others. He was recently awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Michael is currently a Resident Fellow at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska.

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Though visual, his art revolves largely around language. Directly informed by historic events, material significance, and the format of jokes, his subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.

Michael has a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Cue Arts Foundation, and the Asia Society in New York among many others. He was recently awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Michael is currently a Resident Fellow at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska.

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Though visual, his art revolves largely around language. Directly informed by historic events, material significance, and the format of jokes, his subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.

Michael has a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Cue Arts Foundation, and the Asia Society in New York among many others. He was recently awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Michael is currently a Resident Fellow at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska.

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Though visual, his art revolves largely around language. Directly informed by historic events, material significance, and the format of jokes, his subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.

Michael has a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Cue Arts Foundation, and the Asia Society in New York among many others. He was recently awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Michael is currently a Resident Fellow at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska.

Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr. is Professor in the Department of History and Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University. He is the Chief Editor of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. He is also the current President of the Philippine Sociological Society (2011–2013). He has served as President of the International Association of Historians of Asia (2005–2006) and as Chair of the Philippine Social Science Council (2006–2008). He is on the editorial advisory boards of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and Southeast Asian Studies.

After obtaining his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1992, he taught in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, and then in the Department of History and Politics, James Cook University in north Queensland, Australia. After teaching for ten years overseas, he returned to the Philippines in 2003.

He is the author of Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island (University of Hawai'i Press and Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998) and Maalwang Buhay: Family, Overseas Migration, and Cultures of Relatedness in Barangay Paraiso (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009). He is the editor of Filipinos in Global Migrations: At Home in the World? (Philippine Migration Research Network and the Philippine Social Science Council, 2002). His most recent book is Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age (University of Hawai'i Press, 2014). 

His research interests have been broadly interdisciplinary: nationalism and its intersections with race and ethnicity, especially in the early period of Filipino nationalism; the history and dynamics of Philippine global and transnational migrations, citizenship, and the family; Philippine popular political culture; the social histories of sugar and rice in the Philippines; the historical formation of class relations and cultures; contemporary religious movements; and magical worldview and social and historical change.

Kay Cuajunco is a queer pinay activist, educator, and filmmaker. She was born in Guam and is currently based in Oakland, CA. As a granddaughter of Filipino farmers, she reclaims her connection to land through her work organizing for food justice, and she finds healing and creative inspiration cooking for cultural survival. Her first film Roots of Struggle, an anti-imperialist love story revealing the intimate violence of the military-industrial-complex on queer youth, premiered at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival in San Francisco, screened at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit and the Assata Will Rise showcase at the Eastside Arts Alliance, and was awarded best short at the Oakland Pride Film Festival in 2013. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Master of Arts from San Francisco State University where she wrote her thesis on critical pedagogy and farmworker solidarity movements, focusing on the ideas on Paulo Freire and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

Daniel Miller was born in London in 1954. He is currently based at the Department of Anthropology with University College, London. He is the author or editor of thirty-five books dealing with different aspects of the anthropology of consumption, material culture and new media.

Mirca Madianou is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester. From 2004 to 2011, she was Newton Trust Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College. She holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. She has published extensively on the social consequences of new media and mediation especially in relation to processes of migration, transnational relationships and networks. She is the author of Mediating the Nation: News, Audiences and the Politics of Identity (Routledge, 2005) and Migration and New Media (with Daniel Miller, Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Ethics of Media (with Nick Couldry and Amit Pinchevski, 2013). Between 2007 and 2011, she was Principal Investigator on the Economic and Social Research Council-funded project "Migration, ICTS and transnational families," a comparative ethnographic study of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families and their uses of new communication technologies. She continues to work on Philippine migration and the role of digital media in transforming migrant networks.

Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik is conceptual artist working with craft and food to tell the stories of migration. Sita holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College, and an M.F.A. in interdisciplinary art and an M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. Raised in Los Angeles and based in Oakland, she is Indian and Japanese Colombian American. Sita has exhibited and collaborated in the US, Holland, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Mexico. Her projects include installing curry powder in a European castle, importing artisan goods over the US-Mexico border, and leading workshops about food, migration, and memory in Hong Kong. Her most recent project, Estamos contra el muro | We are against the wall, involved the collaborative construction of a border wall made entirely of piñatas. The East Bay Express described it as "the most joyous political critique of the year."
 
Sita is also a co-founder of the People's Kitchen Collective (PKC), who were named in 2016's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ YBCA 100 list. They are recipients of the Center for Asian American Media’s (CAAM) Advocate Award and were awarded support by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Open Spaces Program. PKC recently exhibited with For Freedoms, the first artist-run super PAC at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center's Crosslines pop-up museum. The goal of The People's Kitchen is to not only fill our stomachs but also nourish our souls, feed our minds and fuel a movement.
 
See also peopleskitchencollective.com.

Photo credit: Rachyel Magana