On Monday, 2021 May 24, APIC, in association with IDE, presented a live Zoom Panel/Q&A on Asian/American experiences and underrepresentation in American theater, TV, and film, featuring Raymond J. Lee and Sagan (Diane) Chen ’14, and moderated by Professor Eng-Beng Lim. In conjunction with the panel the Theater and Music Departments sponsored a master class and small-group talk with Ray and Sagan for Dartmouth students, and Hopkins Center Film screened Sagan’s series Sideways Smile.
Below are links with more information and data about Asian underrepresentation in the performing arts.
- The Asian American Performers Action Coalition’s 2018-19 “THE VISIBILITY REPORT: RACIAL REPRESENTATION ON NEW YORK CITY STAGES” (with links to previous reports)
- List of Asian American Tony Award Winners (only 3 for performers ever (!))
- Why Do Asian-Americans Remain Largely Unseen in Film and Television?, The New York Times Style Magazine
- List of Academy Award winners and nominees of Asian descent (with a broad definition of Asia)
RAYMOND J. LEE was most recently in the company of Mack & Mabel at City Center Encores! and Soft Power at The Public Theater. His other Broadway credits include Aladdin, Groundhog Day, Honeymoon in Vegas, Anything Goes, and Mamma Mia! Film/TV credits include Marriage Story, Ghost Town, “Succession,” “Billions,” “Red Oaks,” and “Smash.” Voiceover credits include projects for Dreamworks, Netflix, Nickelodeon, and Penguin Random House. He is a proud graduate of Northwestern University. Follow @raymondjlee and visit www.raymondjlee.com.
SAGAN (DIANE) CHEN ’14 (they/them) is an award-winning actor, director, filmmaker, and theatre artist. As a queer nonbinary chinese-american artist they center their work on uplifting underrepresented voices onstage, onscreen, and on the page. Onstage: Two Mile Hollow (Yale), Six Years Old, Stone, and delicacy of a puffin heart (Corkscrew Theater Festival), Something for the Fish (CPR), Exposed Bone (The PIT Loft). Onscreen: High Maintenance S3 (HBO), Here We Wait and Sideways Smile, a series about an Asian-American woman in her comedic journey to discover her sexuality, and is a recipient of the Made in NY Women’s Fund for Film, Television, and Theatre. Directing: Dartmouth College, Samuel French OOB Festival, Frigid Festival, Corkscrew Festival, Women in Theatre Festival. Narrator of Ana On The Edge. They enjoy reading new scripts for various reading committees, and strive for their artistry to reflect an awareness of social responsibility and intersectionality of representation. Education: Dartmouth College, LAMDA, BLCU. diane-chen.com IG: @dianechen51 .
ENG-BENG LIM, Ph.D., is the founding Director of Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality (RMS) at Dartmouth, an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the author of the national-award-winning book Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU, 2014). His fields of study are performance and cultural studies, Asian/American studies, postcolonial/diaspora studies, and queer/transnational studies. He is currently working on a book project about megastructure and performance, and another on the visual cultures of “ethnocuties.” He is part of the Social Text editorial collective. eng-beng.lim@dartmouth.edu.