2023 Summer Residents
The competitive summer residency program is fully subsidized.
Hannah Bae
Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She was the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. During her residency at Sunlit, she will work on her memoir-in-progress, tentatively titled Way Enough, which interrogates what happens when a survivor of child abuse finally stops trying to outrun her trauma and takes the time to heal. Hannah's writing is focused on Asian American and Korean American communities, and she has published essays on the 1980 Gwangju uprising, justice for Asian women forced into World War II-era sex slavery, mental health and healing from parental abuse in Asian American communities. Her work has been published in the anthologies "Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing," "Uncertain Girls: Poetry, Essential Advice and Practical Know-how for Women Aiming to Set the World on Fire" and "(Don't) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation About Mental Health."
Rosie C. Bermudez
Rosie C. Bermudez is a Chicana from Southeast Los Angeles. She is a social historian of the twentieth-century United States and an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of California San Diego. During her residency at Sunlit, Rosie will be working on developing a chapter for her forthcoming book manuscript, Dignity Warriors: Alicia Escalante and the Multiracial Coalition for Economic Justice and Human Dignity. Her book manuscript is a political biography of the gendered leadership of Alicia Escalante and the organization she founded, the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization. As a social and feminist history, Dignity Warriors is focused on the history of the collective struggle for economic justice and for the recognition of the human dignity of poor women of color on welfare in the 1960s and 1970s. Rosie's journey through the academy began at East Los Angeles College. She received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Chicana and Chicano Studies in 2019 and her research has been supported by several prestigious fellowships. Her teaching interests include Chicana and Latina history, women of color feminisms, twentieth-century social movements, race and ethnicity, oral history, and women’s history.
Suchi Branfman
Suchi Branfman, choreographer, curator, performer, educator, and activist has worked from the war zones of Managua to Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre and Kampala’s Luzira Prison to NYC’s Joyce Theatre. Her work strives to create an embodied terrain grounded in storytelling, dialogue, listening and action. She serves on faculty at Scripps College, striving to create an inclusive pedagogy that democratizes the studio. During her residency at Sunlit, Suchi will be working on her 5-part choreographic work entitled "Doing Time is Stillness and Also Motion." Suchi is currently amidst a ten-year choreographic residency at the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium security state men’s prison in Norco, CA, is Artistic Director of the multi-faceted Dancing Through Prison Walls project choreographing and curating performance, film, and written works in deep collaboration with current and formerly incarcerated movers. Her writing has been published in The Nation, The Dancer-Citizen, Dance Education in Practice and Sming Sming Press. Her award-winning film work has been presented at festivals including Dance Camera West, The Social Justice Film Festival, Real Art Ways Films and Latchis Film Fest.
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Nathan Fitch
Nathan Fitch is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor at The New School University. A member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Nathan’s award winning films have been published by The New York Times Op Docs, TIME magazine, The New Yorker, PBS and NPR, to name a few. Nathan’s feature length directorial debut, Island Soldier, won a number of film festival awards, and was broadcast on PBS in 2018. While at Sunlit Residency, Nathan will be editing footage of his current documentary entitled Essential Islanders, a project exploring the impacts of the global pandemic upon a group of climate change migrants in Arkansas. The film's interwoven personal stories of Pacific Islanders reveals an overlooked and devastating part of American history. Nathan holds an MFA from the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter college, where he was the recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a Picture of the Year International award. Nathan's most recent project, Drawing Life, is a partly animated documentary about the legendary cartoonist George Booth, and was published by The New Yorker Magazine after screening at a number of film festivals.
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Elaine H. Kim
Elaine H. Kim is a queer Korean American fiction writer born and raised in the Midwest, interested in how history -- societal and individual -- folds together into a complex simultaneity: multiple pasts breathing in the now, each of us a vessel of what's come before. While at Sunlit Residency, she will work on her novel, which traces the aftermath of state violence in the lives of one splintered family in 1980s South Korea, examining how they live after war, after loss; how they make sense of the forces of history that shape them; how they embrace or shy away from being agents of change in their lives and in the world around them; how they find themselves and the chosen family that sustains them. Elaine has won fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and was the Justin Chin Memorial Scholarship Fellow at Lambda Literary’s 2021 Emerging Writers Retreat for LGBTQ Voices. Elaine has work published in StoryQuarterly, Guernica, Joyland, Gertrude, So to Speak, upstreet and has a children’s book forthcoming with Scholastic, and has been supported by Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and others. Elaine holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Brown University, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their twins.
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Gloria E. Poveda
Gloria E. Poveda holds a PhD from the School of Education at the University of Michigan. Her areas of specialization are Foundations, Innovation, Research, and Policy, which offered her the opportunity to engage a diverse community of students and faculty members in reimagining education as a central component of the transformation needed to create more inclusive and just societies. While at Sunlit Residency, Gloria will be writing and revising a scholarly article about Chicano community activist, artist, and university professor Malaquias Montoya. Gloria is an Assistant Professor of Service-learning at California Northstate University College of Health Sciences. Her research is part of a sustainable humanities-social science cluster grounded in leadership and innovation with a central focus on Service-learning.
Elizabeth Hanna Rubio
Elizabeth Hanna Rubio is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. In Fall 2023, she will head to UC Santa Barbara where she will be an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies. Prior to arriving to Princeton, she served as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of American Cultures and Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. In June 2021, she received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at UC Irvine. Elizabeth builds on her work as a community organizer to conduct research that responds to emergent questions and practices in leftist social justice spaces. While at Sunlit Residency, Elizabeth will be working on writing a new chapter for her book manuscript entitled Dreams Beyond Recognition: Liberalism’s False Negotiations and the Search for Alternatives in Korean American Immigrant Justice Work. Based on six years of ethnographic research with undocumented Korean American organizers in Southern California, Washington D.C., and Chicago, Dreams Beyond Recognition examines the fraught politics of multiracial coalition-building in immigrant justice spaces and the complexities of enacting immigrant justice through an abolitionist lens. In the upcoming months, she looks forward to initiating new research on how South Korean migratory circuits through Argentina, Canada, and the US reveal the quotidian violences of neoliberal crisis-making. Her work has been published in Amerasia Journal, The Journal for the Anthropology of North America, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other mediums.