Fil-Am educator joins AAPI think tank board

Christine Bacareza Balance

WASHINGTON — The AAPI Victory Alliance, the first ever think tank to focus on AAPI policy issues, named Filipino American professor Christine Bacareza Balance to its advisory board.

AAPI Victory Alliance’s advisory board members are experts in various fields, from immigration to library science to media studies to climate change.

Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Performing & Media Arts and Asian American Studies at Cornell University.

Her writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in Women and Performance: a feminist journal, Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ), and Theatre Journal. Her first book, Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2016), examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino/Filipino American popular music compose Filipino identities, publics, and politics.

Balance is collaborating with Prof. Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA) on the anthology, California Dreaming: Movement & Place in the Asian American Imaginary (University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming).

She is a former board member of KulArts, a Bay Area-based traditional and contemporary Filipino arts organization, and one-eighth of the New York-based indie rock band The Jack Lords Orchestra.