Advisory Council Board of Artists, Designers and Creators
Asian American and Pacific Islander arts have a unique aesthetic that differentiates them from European and other artistic traditions. This advisory council will play a vital role in shaping the museum’s growth while celebrating and amplifying these distinct cultural expressions.
Ariana Lee
Ariana Lee (she/her/她) is a Taiwanese and Chinese American writer from Houston, TX. She is an inaugural 2024 Youth Speaks Public Poets Fellow and has previously served as the 2022-2023 Houston Youth Poet Laureate. She is a two-time member of Meta4 Houston, which became the first youth team from Houston to win Brave New Voices in 2023. Lee has opened for US Poet Laureate Ada Limón and performed original work for NASA, the NCAA, Stop AAPI Hate, the Aspen Institute, the Houston Mayor’s Office, and more. Her work appears in or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Offing, Button Poetry, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere. She is an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Find more at arianalee.com
Gaby Wilson
Gaby Wilson is a writer and multimedia journalist based in New York. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Elle, Oxford American, and SSENSE, among other places. Through her writing on culture — music, movies, fashion, art, the internet — she strives to provide a counterbalance to social atomization, often through a lens that affords greater historical and relational context to what’s popular. She is especially animated by stories that open lanes to better understand and articulate the connections between Filipino and American histories and popular culture.
Gaby also writes for the PBS series Roots of Resistance, which explores important resistance movements and tactics throughout U.S. history that have shaped society today. Her PBS series was just nominated for an NAACP Image Award! Previously, she was a correspondent reporter for VICE and HBO’s Emmy and Peabody-winning documentary news program, VICE News Tonight, and for MTV News. She has also developed and produced editorial projects for Apple Music and Nike. In 2023, Gaby collaborated with artist Kamolros Wonguthum on an exhibition catalog for Gallery VER, an artist-run gallery co-initiated by Rirkrit Tiravanija, and in 2022, she was a finalist for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellowship.
Gaby grew up in five different countries and six different states, received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, and lives in Brooklyn.
Neha Misra
Neha Misra नेहा मिश्रा (she/her) is a contemporary eco-folk artist, poet, and an award-winning climate justice advocate. Neha’s Mother Earth wisdom centered interdisciplinary studio embodies the transformative power of art to build bridges between our private, collective, planetary healing and justice. Neha’s creative practice is rooted in her Global Majority lineage as a first-generation, multi-lingual immigrant woman from New Delhi, India, who calls a solar-powered intentional community in the Washington, DC metro her beloved adopted home. Neha is a 2023-2025 Hamiltonian Artists Fellow. She is a recipient of Nootana Washington DC’s 2024 “Preronadayini/Inspiration Giver” Distinguished Creative Leadership Award, and the North Carolina Climate Justice Collectives’ introductory 2024 Arts Residency. She has been honored as a Presidential Leadership Scholar, and as a Regenerative Artivist by the Design Science Studio—a partnership of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and habRitual for leading planet conscious artists. Neha is a 2022 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis — an initiative of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the OpEd Project to change who writes history. She serves as the inaugural Global Ambassador for the nonprofit Remote Energy to make the solar energy field more inclusive for BIPOC communities, especially women of color. As Co-Founder of award-winning social enterprise Solar Sister, Neha’s climate leadership delivered local women-led renewable energy solutions to over four million people across Africa. Neha is an honorary advisory board member of Silver Spring Town Center Inc, a local arts non-profit that activates public spaces with cultural events that embrace the capital region’s diversity. She is a member of Sandy Spring Museum Regional Folklife Center’s Strategic Advisory Committee. Neha’s visionary leadership has been featured by Forbes, National Geographic Magazine, Next Billion, Ms. Magazine, Mothers of Invention, Miami Art Week Regenaissance, The Revelator, The UN Chronicle, Grist, Voice of America and Humanity Rising. She seeks to live in solidarity with those committed to creating a just and sustainable shared world through renewed ways of being and belonging. Learn more at nehamisrastudio.com