PR for the People Spotlight: Lehua M. Taitano for APAture Festival 2024
This is a series of interviews with participants in PapaLoDown’s ‘PR for the People workshop’. Hear first hand from amazing people and organizations, who are learning how to amplify and document their stories in the news, grow their visibility and attract new opportunities.
What is your background and experience?
My name is Lehua M. Taitano, a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam). I’m the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island (WordTech Editions) and A Bell Made of Stones (TinFish Press). My chapbook, appalachiapacific, won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. I’ve also served as a curatorial advisor for institutions such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, among others. I’m also an artist and cofounder of the artist collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Most recently I’m the Program and Community Manager at Kearny Street Workshop.
What is the Public Relations (PR) campaign you're working on about?
This year, I worked on producing APAture, a multidisciplinary arts festival, featuring over 50 emerging Pacific Islander and Asian/Asian American artists in 7 events over the course of 5 weeks.
What goals did you hope to accomplish through this PR campaign?
To create a press release and promote the festival to local media outlets.
How has the experience of pitching and working with the media to amplify and document the stories in your PR campaign been like so far?
Though I was pressed for time, as I joined PR for the People while I was well into the project, pitching to media was a new experience for me. I value all I learned, as it helped raise awareness of the festival and allowed Kearny Street to promote it via television, newspaper, and podcast outlets.
What are a few things you know now about PR that you didn't know before you started?
I now know the importance of including quotations and photos in a press release, in order to allow media outlets to gather information about my events quickly and effectively. I also know how to use google search tools to glean information on similar events in my area and to gain resources for my own events.
What other projects are you working on that we should have on our radar?
The collective I’m part of currently has an exhibit up at Kearny Street Workshop. The collective is comprised of artists Lisa Jarrett (Portland, OR), and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng (Honolulu, HI). Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century is the culmination of years (and ancestral lifetimes) of shared curiosity, vision, and an outright insistence to see our culture thrive within contemporary art. Art 25 investigates how Indigenous and Black art lives in the 21st century and collaborates with contemporary artists worldwide who envision how it will flourish in the 25th century and beyond. In forming a future archive, the collective interrogates historical access, curation, collection, consumption, and preservation of Indigenous and Black art and culture. The exhibit runs through February 15, 2025, for more information visit > https://www.kearnystreet.org/events-blog/futureancestorsart25.
