Michelle Dizon - Artist & filmmaker making Filipino histories visible

With an introduction by curator Christina Linden Co-Sponsored by the Oakland Museum of California In conjunction with the solo exhibition "Drifting Islands" http://museumca.org/exhibit/michelle-dizon-drifting-islands 7:30 – 9pm, Monday, October 19th, 2015 160 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley Campus Free and Open to the Public Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, theorist, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. Born in the United States as part of the Philippine diaspora, Dizon’s life experience has been shaped by the politics of migration across the Pacific Rim. The violence of imperialism and the intimate spaces of resistances within globalization form central pivots in her work which take the form of multi-channel video installations, expanded cinema performances, essay films, photographs, discursive events, pedagogical platforms, and writing. “Dizon is a second-generation Filipino immigrant who lived in the Bay Area for many years but is now based in Los Angeles. Much of her work grapples with Filipino history, attempting to reclaim the past through her own perspective. As a member of a group whose cultural memory has in many ways been erased from American history books, Dizon‘s work emerges from a yearning to gain access to that collective memory through alternative modes of remembering. ‘[I am] looking for that history in landscapes, looking for that history in bodies, in voices, in images,’ said Dizon in a recent interview, ‘and trying to piece together ways of telling a story that I know exists, because I live it, but that doesn’t have words – that hasn’t been given words – because the colonizers are those in power of the story.'” – Sarah Burke, “Michelle Dizon‘s Drifting Memories” East Bay Express, 7/29/2015