Featuring Women Identifying AAPI
Do you belong to your name?
My Name Story is a portrait-video project that examines the AAPI experience through the lens of our names at the intersections of race, gender and class. This project explores themes of identity, belonging, and reclamation in a country that oftentimes labels AAPIs as the other and perpetual foreigner. The project includes women from different generations, ethnicities and experiences who have had, at one point or another, struggles with their names and the meanings attached to them.
The Stories
Participants of My Name Story were asked to share the stories of their names through photographs. They tell their stories in a video interview as well have a portrait taken with a photograph of themselves that represent the story of their names. Each participant also wrote letters to the version of themselves they were photographed with to help them process and reflect on their name stories.
Coming Soon
All of the portraits and videos for the first cohort of seven women will be available in the near future. In the meantime, please view the first three portraits and listen to a condensed audio preview of each woman’s story.
Help this Project Gain More Visibility
We are fundraising to get more visibility for this project through exhibits and community experiences. Please consider donating for basic material costs to make this happen. Learn more by clicking ont he Go Fund Me link below. Thank you.
About Us
Learn more about the duo behind My Name Story project. Are you interested in featuring this project or being a part of it? Please reach out to Judy at judyleephotos@gmail.com.
Judy Lee is the creator of My Name Story and began this project when she started thinking about her own name story and how it’s been a reflection of her struggles and journey with identity and selfhood in the context of larger questions about race and gender. She is a Transformative Portrait Photographer who uses photographs to help women process their journeys through self-reflection, personal growth, and radical self love and acceptance. She is also a WomanSpeak leader, a program designed to teach women to trust their voices and themselves and so they can become more powerful, embodied speakers.
Tatyana Kurepina is documentary filmmaker who works with local artists to strengthen their connection to the community around them through visual storytelling. She became involved with My Name Story project not only because of her own experiences grappling with her identity as an immigrant, but because she had a deep sense of urgency to help document stories that have been untold for so long. She will be shooting and editing a documentary about Judy’s name story, while weaving in the stories of the women interviewed for this project. She hopes this documentary encourages all of us to examine the complexities of our identity and how we move through the world.
