Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program Blog

We are happy to announce that Konrad Ng will be joining the APA Program as the new Director this spring.

Dr. Konrad Ng is Director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.  Prior to joining the Smithsonian Institution, Ng was a professor in the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Academy for Creative Media.  His professional and scholarly work examines how Asian and Asian American communities use cinema and digital media to engage in artistic and cultural representation and preservation, and community mobilization.

Under Dr. Ng’s leadership, the Asian Pacific American program supported the Smithsonian Folklife Festival Program, “Asian Pacific Americans: Local Lives, Global Ties,“ and developed “Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter,” a groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary portraiture about the Asian American experience, with the National Portrait Gallery.  He is currently overseeing two major heritage initiatives, “HomeSpun: The Smithsonian Indian American Heritage Project” and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Asian Pacific Americans Project.  Ng is also at work on a new media project to commemorate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and working with the Smithsonian Latino Center on a project about Asian and Latino intersections in history, art and culture.

From 2010-2011, Dr. Ng served as Senior Adviser and Acting Director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, overseeing an increase in staffing, resources and programs.  Ng was the curator of film and video at the Honolulu Museum of Art and from 2002-2004, he was the festival coordinator and film programmer for the Hawaii International Film Festival.  Ng was the program manager for the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii’s International Cultural Studies Graduate Certificate Program, assisting with the administration of the program, its curriculum, and its students and faculty.  Ng serves on the boards of several nonprofit arts and culture organizations: the Center for Asian American Media, the Global Film Initiative, the Asian American Literary Review, and the Honolulu urban arts collective, Interisland Terminal. He is a member of the Association for Asian American Studies and Australia’s Academy of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Dr. Ng earned his doctorate in political science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, his master’s degree in cultural, social and political thought from the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, and his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and ethnic studies from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

Related Links

• Smithsonian’s official press release