This year’s culminating event for Leadership Camp: a̷s̷i̷a̷ ̷u̷n̷a̷u̷t̷h̷o̷r̷i̷z̷e̷d̷, the seventh iteration of AAAinA’s reading group series, invites an ongoing experiment in group study. Campers will gather in a closed study session to share practices, readings, references, and unfinished lines of thought over a shared meal. Participants will reflect on the process of collaborative study as a social form and its intersections with this year’s theme, “Asia Unauthorized,” which related to questions of legitimacy, practices of dissent, and negotiations of the commons.

The cohort will invite guests engaged in adjacent inquiries and practices to expand the conversation, opening space for unexpected resonances and future collaboration.

Initiated in 2016, Leadership Camp is a long-standing program at AAAinA that brings together arts practitioners at varying stages of their careers to discuss through an “Asian” lens a wide range of topics impacting art, art practice, and the arts profession. This Camper-led program encourages discussion, debate, and knowledge sharing and begins with an overarching theme, an initial set of “framing questions,” and a reading list. Please join AAAinA’s mailing list for information on the next open call for Leadership Camp. 

2026 Leadership Camp Participants:

Zuhra Amini (b. 1996, Kabul) is a writer and curator living in Brooklyn, NY. Shaped by a transcultural context conditioned by displacement, her research focuses on spatial relations, material histories, and visual culture studies. As a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 2018, she studied diasporic cultural production and the socio-spatial realities of art institutions internationally. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where her research focused on contemporary art of the Afghan diaspora. She holds a BA in Race and Ethnic Studies with a concentration in critical discourse analysis from Whitman College. 

Oorja Garg (b. New Delhi, India) is a curator and art historian based in New York. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and has worked with institutions in New York, New Delhi, and Mexico City. Her curatorial practice is research-driven and engages with both material and digital cultures, as well as the intersections of contemporary art and popular culture. She is particularly interested in how artistic inquiry shapes and responds to broader cultural and technological shifts.

Justin Han (b. 1999, Rochester, NY) is an artist and archivist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work draws pictorial tactics from cinema and theater, staging scenes where spaces, beings, and devices congregate autonomously. In these patchworks, functional and decorative objects alike echo the wayward movement of cultural capital throughout world history, by way of land, sea, and survival in time. He is especially interested in how visual culture can reflect the tense emergence of new coalitions, especially under wavering economic and infrastructural conditions.

Delaney Chieyen Holton is a writer and curator based in New York, with roots in the US South. They are currently a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University. Their research examines infrastructural power and the politics of the erotic in visual culture, with a focus on lens-based media in transpacific anti-imperialist lineages. Del has contributed to projects with MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Asian American Media, and Berkeley Art Museum, among others. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in Film Quarterly, Screen Slate, Flash, Elephant, X-TRA, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Frontiers, and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. With Ven Qiu, they co-steward a karaoke archive in Brooklyn.

Li-Ming Hu is an artist, recovering actor and sometime writer born in Aotearoa/New Zealand currently based in Queens, NY. Often employing a carnivalesque sensibility, her work engages with the imperatives of high performance culture, drawing on her background in the entertainment industry to explore the production and performance of subjectivity within contemporary cultural economies. She has performed at the Rubin Foundation, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Momentary, and the Center for Performance Research and exhibited recently at the Goethe-Institut NYC and the New Zealand Portrait Gallery.

Alex Ito (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is an artist, curator, and writer based in Queens, New York. Ito’s practice reframes visual cultures of violence at the intersection of war, industrialization, and popular culture. Through an interdisciplinary practice that incorporates sculpture, assemblage, and video, Ito proposes ways to recognize the precarious frameworks of life in a world of uncertainty and potential. He has exhibited in various domestic and international exhibitions and has published written work with Affidavit, The Amp, Silica Mag, and Artsy. Ito is the Director of Chen’s, a Brooklyn project space co-organized with Howie Chen. 

Dylan Seh-Jin Kim is a curator who lives in Brooklyn. He works as Curatorial Assistant at MoMA PS1 and the Programs Coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI). He is the Protocinema Emerging Curator for 2025-2026. He was a participant in ICI’s New York Curatorial Seminar, a Bandung Resident at Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) & Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), and a Curatorial Fellow at NARS Foundation. He has organized and worked on exhibitions and programs at MoMA PS1, Protocinema, Unclebrother, FAR–NEAR, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Tutu Gallery, NARS Foundation, Columbia University, brownstones, restaurants, and elsewhere. He was a guest speaker for Pratt Institute’s Arts and Cultural Management, MPS program. He was a participant in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program for 2024-25. He received a BA in Philosophy and Film and Media Studies from Columbia University.

Jen Liu (she/they) is a New York-based visual artist working in video, painting, biomaterial, programming, and performance, looking at histories of labor, diasporic Asian identities, and the ways in which technology features in both. Her most recently completed body of work, Pink Slime Caesar Shift, centered stories of political resistance, and was built on a proposal to use the domestic food distribution network in China as a covert information network for labor activists. Liu worked with biologists to genetically alter beef cells to store encrypted texts on labor and protest, and used the materials and methods of genetic engineering as starting points for films and paintings. Liu’s current body of work, Future Perfect 888666, is structured on the fluidity of elemental mercury, in which histories of invisible labor converge – Chinese American sex workers in the 19th century, AI microlaborers, and xenobots. In this project she continues to collage together nonfiction sources to reveal the underlying dreamlike logic of entanglement capitalism. She has presented work at MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, The Kitchen, and Sculpture Center, New York; and has participated in the Shanghai Biennale, Singapore Biennial, Taipei Biennial, and multiple iterations of the Berlinale. 

Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist and media educator. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. 

Majeed has shown in venues across Pakistan, North America, and Europe. Majeed’s  solo exhibitions include; ‘In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present’, Rubber Factory, New York (2018) and ‘Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Facts about the Earth)’, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia (2021), ‘Made in Trans-Pakistan’, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022), and ‘J😀YTECH’, Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2025-6). 

She is a recipient of numerous fellowships including the HWP Fellowship, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017), Refiguring Feminist Futures Web Residency, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018), the Digital Earth Fellowship, Hivos, the Netherlands (2018-19), Technology Residency, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2020), QM-Jerome Fellowship (2024), and ISCP Pollock Krasner Fellowship (2025). Majeed is currently a Y12 NEW INC member- Extended Realities Track. 

Vishal Nyayapathi (aka Thammudu, b. 1999, Long Island) is a Brooklyn-based experimental electronic musician. Their work engages sampling, synthesis, and handmade instrument design. Their collaborative EP released on London-based label TT has been featured on NTS and BBC Radio 6. They are inspired by this year’s Leadership Camp theme to think through spatial metaphors like “global music” and “deep listening,” as our discussions look toward alternative geographies.

Sruti Suryanarayanan (they/them, b. 1997 in New Jersey) is a Brooklyn-based Tamil craftsperson who builds systems that help people channel their culture to resist the dominant systems of racial, economic, and migration inequity. Sruti is a weaver, an auto-theorist, and (thus) a pickler, is interested in administrative, domestic, and maintenance arts. They find inspiration in the works of John Woodrow Wilson, Christina Sharpe, and puppet shows put on by children.They are also an Artist Organizer at Art.coop, a collective that exists to grow an arts/culture movement rooted in solidarity by centering artists and cultural workers making systems-change irresistible. At Art.coop, Sruti focuses on redistribution efforts and systems that rethink flows of resources (financial, material, intangible) on the terms of self-determination and cooperation. In addition, Sruti is a mentor at NEW INC, and previously organized with Cultural Solidarity Fund, Interference Archive, and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT). They are currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Genocide Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and a pupusa batch in their kitchen.

Danielle Wu is a writer and curator based in New York. She is primarily interested in artists who engage in biting institutional critique: against regimes of truth, beauty, religious authority, and fantasy that shape reality and dissent. She is currently the Communications and Exhibitions Director at Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) and was previously a Digital Fellow at Democracy Now! Her reviews have been published in Art in America, Artforum, Frieze Magazine, The Offing, among other publications. Notable curatorial projects include Just Between Us: From the Archives of Arlan Huang with Howie Chen at Pearl River Mart, New York (2023); Water Works at International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York (2022); and Ghost in the Ghost with scholar Anne Anlin Cheng at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York (2019).

Funding Credits:

The event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and other foundations and individuals.