Intern Spotlight: Jenna Peng
Meet Jenna Peng - PapaLoDown x API Cultural Center Intern
The PapaLoDown team is happy to announce our newest intern, Jenna Peng, who is working on the PR campaign for the API Cultural Center’s ‘United States of Asian America Festival’ (USAAF), this spring!
Get to know Jenna, what she’s learned about public relations so far in the internship, her observations on the SF/Bay Area’s APIA arts community, and her favorite picks for the upcoming USAAF.
1. What is the most useful tool/tactic/tip you've learned about PR so far in your internship?
I’ve learned that being a publicist often means acting as a translator between the client and the press. Through this internship, I’ve learned how to effectively frame stories for writers. So thinking about – How can I draw out possible narratives around our shared areas of interest? How does the work of a local API arts organization connect more broadly to Bay Area communities or national news? How is API history and heritage compelling and significant in and of itself?
Jenna Peng with the API Cultural Center team - Melanie Elvena, Diana Li, Vinay Patel, Dara Del Rosario of SOMArts Cultural Center, and Paloma of PapaLoDown Agency, at Nancy Hom’s exhibit “Passionate Engagement”.
2. Being new to SF, Has working with APICC and learning about the SF/Bay Area's APIA Arts and Culture scene inspired you in anyway?
Working with APICC has been really incredible. Something I’m really struck by is how close-knit the API arts community is here. This lends itself to programming that continuously produces these extremely natural and generative exchanges between artists, curators, and audience members. Not being from a place with these strong community bonds, I came to SF wondering how to curate engaging sites for community organizing and collective imagining. And the answer is – it’s happening here, has been happening here. The artist and art-making is inextricable from radical community care. It feels rare, special, and also wonderfully matter-of-fact.
3. What are you looking forward to with the upcoming USAAF?
I’m really looking forward to all that I mentioned above, seeing how the artists create and curate with community at the center. I feel like the Rooted Recipes Project is doing really compelling work along this vein of reimagining the forms curation can take – what if meaning-making happened as meal-making? Some events in particular dovetail with my personal interests. I’m excited about EcoPoca and their interest in rewriting apocalyptic inevitabilities through excavating ancestral eco-wisdom. I’m also excited for Sally Wen Mao’s reading which will be happening at I-Hotel. I’m interested to see what comes from this poetic intervention into public space and memory.
Learn More about The United States of Asian American Festival
About Jenna Peng:
Jenna Peng is a recent graduate of Amherst College, where she studied postcolonial literature and nurtured her practice as a frequent reader and occasional writer of experimental poetry. Hailing from small town Pennsylvania and even smaller town western Massachusetts, she is beyond relieved to land in San Francisco and experience this hub of AAPI activism, creativity, and community. Her passion for listening to decentered voices and curating sites for collective imagining guides her work as Interviews Editor for Winter Tangerine and Editorial Assistant for the Asian American Literary Review. As PapaLoDown Agency’s PR Intern, she is looking forward to supporting the United States of Asian America Festival and celebrating the vibrancy of APIA arts in the Bay Area.