Multimedia artist Anida Yoeu Ali and urban anthropologist LinDa Saphan converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Raised in Chicago and born in Cambodia, she is a woman of mixed heritage with Malay, Cham, Khmer and Thai ancestry. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. Ali is the winner of the 2024 Arts Innovator Award and the 2014-2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize for her series The Buddhist Bug, a multidisciplinary and internationally recognized work that investigates displacement and identity through humor, absurdity and performance. Ali has performed and exhibited at the Haus der Kunst, Palais de Tokyo, Musée d'art Contemporain Lyon, Jogja National Museum, Malay Heritage Centre, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, The Smithsonian, and the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Her artistic works have been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Art Matters Foundation. Ali’s pioneering poetry work with the critically acclaimed performance group I Was Born With Two Tongues (1998-2003) is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. Currently based in Tacoma, Ali is also the co-founder of Studio Revolt, an award-winning independent artist-run media lab. Ali holds an MFA from School of the Art Institute Chicago (2010) and a BFA from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1998). Ali currently serves as a senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington, Bothell where she teaches courses in Interdisciplinary Arts, Global Studies and Performance. She spends her time traveling and making art between the Asia-Pacific region and the US.

LinDa Saphan, a Fulbright Scholar, is an urban anthropologist and a prominent voice in Cambodian cultural studies. She has published extensively on Cambodia's early popular music. LinDa served as the lead researcher and associate producer for the documentary film Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll, and has acted as executive producer for several other film projects. She is the author of Faded Reels: The Art of Four Cambodian Filmmakers 1960-1975, published by the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2022, and Remnant of the Past: A Filmography of Cambodian Early Cinema in 2024. Since 2013, LinDa has been a professor of sociology, and in 2025, she became the Assistant Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mount Saint Vincent.

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