Jasmine Alinder

Jasmine is an interdisciplinary, community-engaged scholar and teacher of public history, history of photography, and history of Japanese Americans during World War II. Her research focuses on photography as a representational practice. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois). She has also contributed to volumes including Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II (UNC); Patrick Nagatani’s Desire for Magic (University of New Mexico); and Photography and Migration (Routledge). In 2018, she co-authored Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Someday Chicago with John Tain (Chicago: DePaul Art Museum and University of Chicago) and a digital-born essay in the Virtual Asian American Art Museum with Jamison Ellis (“Home Making: James Numata’s Photography of Post-War Chicago”). The overarching themes that unite her work are human rights and civil liberties, with a focus on the United States from the 1940s to the present. She served as the lead academic advisor and content curator for The Orange Story and will ensure that the expanded educational content is accurate and well-researched. She currently serves as the Dean of Humanities and a Professor of History at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

Email: [email protected]

Emma Ito

Emma Ito is the Director of Education at Virginia Humanities. Emma previously worked at the Library of Virginia, where she spearheaded several Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) projects at the Library of Virginia and created new resources for those interested in researching APIDAs in Virginia at edu.lva.virginia.gov/apidaresources. Emma received her B.A. and M.A. in History at Virginia Commonwealth University where her Master’s thesis focused on the experiences of Japanese and Japanese Americans in Virginia, specifically during the periods of Jim Crow and World War II.

Email: [email protected]

Ting-Yi Oei

Ting-Yi Oei is a lifelong educator. He received his BA in History from Hamilton College and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Brown University. He taught middle and high school social studies for 20 years and was a high school administrator for another ten in Virginia. Along the way he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea, was a Fulbright Teacher in Scotland, and spent a year teaching in the Dominican Republic. He was also awarded a one-year research fellowship at Teaching Tolerance (now Learning for Justice) the education project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. He is a curriculum consultant and serves as the Education Director for the 1882 Foundation with a particular interest in improving the quality of teaching of Asian Pacific American history and culture.

Email: [email protected]

Jason Matsumoto

Jason is a fourth-generation Japanese American producer and musician from Chicago. Jason co-produced The Orange Story, an early Full Spectrum project funded by the U.S. National Park Service that aims to provide educational content about civil liberties as told through the lens of Japanese American incarceration during WWII. Jason is the director and primary composer for Chicago-based music ensemble Ho Etsu Taiko. Jason is also a strategy consultant for Miyamoto Unosuke Shoten (Tokyo), a 150 year old traditional Japanese instrument maker who officially serves the Emperor of Japan. Prior to joining Full Spectrum’s staff, Jason spent 10 years in the financial derivatives industry, retiring in 2017 as Director of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s strategic pricing team.

Email: [email protected]

Ashley Cheyemi McNeil

****McNeil earned her bi-national PhD in English from Georgia State University and in American Studies from the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. As a manager for the Student Innovation Fellowship at Georgia State, she worked with cross-disciplinary teams of students, faculty, and community partners to imagine and implement public-facing projects that leveraged digital tools to display and disseminate stories and research. She focused her efforts on engaging the rich knowledge networks outside of academia, frequently partnering with minority groups in the Atlanta area. She is joining Full Spectrum Features as a ACLS Leading Edge Fellow where she will play a crucial role in developing and releasing Hidden Histories, which will serve as a model for teaching other histories of marginalized people through narrative cinema.

Email: