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Indepth Arts News:
"Artist in Residence: Spencer Nakasako"
2001-04-22 until 2001-09-02
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, MN,
USA
Believing that everyone should have access to the media of video and television to tell their
stories, California-based filmmaker Spencer Nakasako became the artist mentor for a youth
video program in San Franciscos Tenderloin district. For more than a decade Vietnamese.
Laotian, and Cambodian youths have produced short videos based on their personal
memories and experiences. As a Walker artist-in-residence, Nakasako will conduct two
workshops with groups consisting of 8 to 10 young people, each from a different ethnic
community in the Twin Cities. In April, he will work with Hmong youths who are grappling
with the challenges of growing up as the first generation to be born in this country. In June,
the artist will hold a workshop with a group of Native Americans whose personal stories
reflect the perceptions of the indigenous culture.
Nakasakos residency will incorporate one of the Walkers newest initiatives: the mobile art
lab Walker on Wheels (WoW), which will be equipped with digital cameras and an editing
suite. Under the filmmakers direction and in collaboration with the Southeast Asian
Community Council, teens from the Hmong community will spend one week shooting and
editing their films in WoW, stationed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
Nakasako won a national Emmy Award for a.k.a. Don Bonus, the video diary of a Cambodian
immigrant teenager. His recent work, Kelly Loves Tony, a video diary about a Lu Mien
teenage couple growing up too fast and too soon in Oakland, California, aired nationally on
PBS last summer. He also wrote the screenplay and codirected a feature film about Hong
Kong. Life Is Cheap. . . but Toilet Paper Is Expensive, with Wayne Wang. Recently, he was
awarded a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and he also teaches film in the Ethnic
Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Nakasako has just returned
from Cambodia where he has been filming a diary project for public television.
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