April I Issue: Female Gaze
Each issue we feature some of our readers to highlight the diversity and stories of Asian women, non-binary individuals, and other gender minorities around the world. Here are this issue’s Overachievers!
Mia Rios is a Filipina-American from San Jose, CA. She is the founder of the Triple A Movement, a community organization created to raise awareness and representation of the Asian/Asian-American population during the COVID-19 pandemic. She currently attends the University of San Francisco, as a second-year Psychology Major and double minor in Music and Child & Youth Studies. In her free time, she enjoys singing and playing the ukulele and the piano, as well as being with her family and friends. Through empowerment and motivation, Mia hopes that others become as impacted as her to take action on AAPI racism and other social issues, especially across the Bay Area.
IG: @mia.g.rios / @triple.a.movement
Rachel Austin is a visual artist born and based in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.F.A. in Ceramics from the Maryland Institute College of Art in the Spring of 2020. Rachel’s upbringing with her Filipina mother and her White American father has brought her visual investigations to ask the United States of America what “Asian-ness” looks like in the hyperreality it has created of Asian America. She initiates questions with ceramic objects that embody culturally specific and contradictory histories around the myth of the Asian monolith. In replicating, rearranging, resurfacing, deconstructing, destructing, and reconstructing these icons to show them in different perspectives she scrapes against flattened conceptualizations of Asian American stories.
Website: rachelaustinmakes.com
Instagram: @r.l.austin.makes
Erica Chang (she/her) is a Chinese Hawaiian American. She has traveled to several countries in Asia and has spent time studying trauma, memoirs and testimonies and often ponders how we can honor those who have come before us and the legacy they have enriched us with. Currently, she can be found in beautiful Tacoma, WA, working in higher education and teaching vinyasa yoga classes in her community. With yoga, she has found a melding of the best things in her life-laughter, sweat, community, and strength. These roles fill her cup, as do the mountains and ocean that surround her.
@sarahyasukochi is the CEO of @HouseCollectivesd, a premier Digital Marketing Agency that helps multi-seven figure conscious brands in the sustainable living space attract high-quality, high-converting leads and create meaningful customer connections.
Sarah also owns @blazeandwander, an award winning, lifestyle and e-commerce business that partners with makers and artisans around the world to outfit tiny trailblazers and little wanderers.
Sarah attributes much of her success to Marketing, Mindfulness and Magic. As a multi-passionate Entrepreneur, she is also an artist and aspiring author currently documenting - through poetry and prose - her path as an American-born Filipina and journey to Ancestral Re-membering. She lives in Luiseno territory (Oceanside, California.)