Also-Known-As, Inc.
FDR Station
PO BOX 6037
New York, NY 10150

Email: info@alsoknownas.org

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Also-Known-As 15th Anniversary:
Many Faces, Many Lives: Celebrating the International Adoptee Community Itinerary

Friday, April 29, 2011
18:30 – 21:30              Welcome Reception and Registration at Red Bar

Saturday, April 30, 2011
Breakfast (On Your Own)
09:00 – 10:00             Registration for Anniversary
                                   Hotel Pennsylvania, 6th Floor Conference Center
09:00 – 12:00             Conference-“Past, Present & Future”
                                      Workshops, Sessions & Presentations
12:00 – 13:30             Lunch
                                      Bon Chon* or Food Gallery 32** with Voucher
13:30 – 16:45              Workshops, Sessions & Presentations
17:15 – 17:30             Buses to Kum Gang San
18:30 – 21:30              Gala Korean Dinner: Kum Gang San, Flushing, Queens
                                     Dress Code: Semi-Formal Attire / Hanbok
21:30                           Buses Return to Hotel Pennsylvania
22:30 –                        Closing Celebrations

Sunday, May 1, 2011
11:00 – 15:00             Optional Informal Brunch
                                      Hotel Pennsylvania, 6th Floor, Paris Room

 

*Lunch at Bon Chon will be available from 11:00am-4:00pm
**Food Gallery 32 will be available from 12:00pm-3:00pm

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Registration

Full Conference Registration and Check-in
Registration and check-in will occur on Friday April 29th during the Opening Reception at Red Bar and on Saturday April 30th at the Hotel Pennsylvania.  Registrants will pick up their Conference ID badge, Lunch Voucher, and other conference materials.

Friday (April 29th)	6:30 PM to 9:30 PM	Red Bar 51 West 35th Street, 2nd Floor, between 5th and 6th Avenues
Saturday (April 30th)	9:00 AM to 10:00 AM	6th Floor at the Hotel Pennsylvania 401 Seventh Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets

 

Gala Dinner Only Registration and Check-in
For participants that registered for only the Gala Dinner, registration and check-in will be available at both the Hotel Pennsylvania and restaurant on Saturday April 30th.  Gala Dinner registrants that intend to take the bus transportation from the Hotel Pennsylvania are reminded to arrive on time.  The Buses will leave for the restaurant at 5:30 PM.

Saturday (April 30th)	4:00 PM to 5:00 PM	6th Floor at the Hotel Pennsylvania 401 Seventh Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets
	6:00 PM to 7:00 PM	Kum Gang San 138-28 Northern Boulevard Flushing, NY 11354

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Friday Night Reception at Red Bar
[OPEN TO FULL CONFERENCE REGISTRANTS ONLY]

Sponsored by the Association of Korean Adoptees – San Francisco (AKA SF).

The Opening Reception will be held at Red Bar, only blocks away from Korea town and the Hotel Pennsylvania.  The venue will be only opened to full conference registrants of the Also-Known-As, Inc. 15 Year Anniversary Celebration from 6:30pm to 9:30pm on Friday April 29th.

  

Red Bar
51 West 35th Street, 2nd Floor (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
New York, NY 10001

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Also-Known-As, Inc.  Saturday Conference and Workshops:  “Past, Present, and Future”
[OPEN TO FULL CONFERENCE REGISTRANTS ONLY]

The complete summary of workshops, presentations, film, and art and their presenters’ bios are located at the end of this web page.  The conference schedule can be found [Conference Schedule]

Saturday Lunch (30 April 2011)

Saturday’s lunch will be handled with vouchers. Be sure to pick up your lunch voucher when you register.  If you miss registration, visit us on the 6th floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM on Saturday, April 30th.  Only one Voucher per person.  The  voucher cannot be replaced if lost or stolen.

Lunch will be served at BonChon Chicken on Fifth Avenue from 11AM to 4PM. Present your voucher and ID badge to your server before ordering. There is a set menu for conference participants. Tip is included if you only order from the set menu. Anything ordered off the set menu should be covered by you.

BonChon Chicken
325 5th Ave.
(between 32nd & 33rd Streets)
http://www.bonchon.com/

Your voucher can also be redeemed at Food Gallery 32 from 12PM to 3PM. Present your voucher and ID badge to the Also-Known-As representative standing at the front entrance when you arrive. If your purchase exceeds $10, you will have to pay the difference.

Food Gallery 32
11 W. 32nd Street
(between 5th Ave & Broadway)
http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2011/03/guide-to-food-gallery-32-koreatown-food-court.html

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Raffle

Starting Friday evening you can purchase raffle tickets for $2 each or 6 for $5.  Some of the great prizes you could win include a Nintendo Wii and a Wii Fit, Nike sneakers, Nike warm up jacket, a bottle of wine, Atelier Cologne perfume, a years subscription to Adoption Today, and many more great prizes

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Gala Dinner

On Saturday evening (April 30th, 2011), Also-Known-As, Inc. will feature a Gala Dinner to celebrate the organization’s 15 year anniversary.  The Gala Dinner will be held at the Korean restaurant Kum Gang San.  The Gala Dinner will be buffet style in Kum Gang San’s Banquet Hall.  There will a large variety of Korean food served for dinner and desert and a full open bar (wine, beer, mixed drinks/cocktails, soda, etc...).  The Gala Dinner will feature speakers and a presentation celebrating the 15 Years of Also-Known-As, Inc.  Also, winners of the raffle will be announced at the dinner.

For participants who will be taking the bus from the Hotel Pennsylvania to the restaurant and back, you are reminded to be on time.  The buses will leave the Hotel Pennsylvania at 5:30 PM.  

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Saturday Night Closing Party

The details of the closing celebrations will be announced at the Opening Reception on Friday.

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Optional Informal Brunch

[OPEN TO FULL CONFERENCE REGISTRANTS ONLY]

On Sunday May 1st from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM, full conference registrants can stop by the 6th Floor Paris Room in the Hotel Pennsylvania for an informal brunch.

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Contact
For any questions regarding the Also-Known-As, Inc. 15 Year Anniversary, please email info@alsoknownas.org

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Conference Presentations and Work-Shops[Conference Schedule]
Time:  9:00am to 4:30pm

Finding our Voices [Amanda L. Baden, Ph.D.]
open to international adoptees and others

This session will include experiential, informational, and interactive learning opportunities. Through the presentation of a model of identity for transracial and international adoptees, the presenter will provide information about adjustment of adoptees and about the racial and cultural experiences that affect adoptees and their adoptive families. This session addresses the need for adoptees and adoptive parents to understand the racial dynamics that impact their lives and their relationships. Examples of issues faced by children, adolescents, and adults who were adopted transracially as well as exercises and discussion will enable participants to articulate their racial experiences so that they might better understand the effects of their unique racial consciousness experiences and how that affects them.

Amanda Baden is an Associate Professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She was adopted from Hong Kong and raised in the US. Her research and clinical practice focus on adoption triad members, transracial/international adoption issues, racial and cultural identity, and multicultural counseling competence. Dr. Baden co-created a model of identity (Cultural-Racial Identity Model) for transracial/international adoptees. She is one of the editors of The Handbook of Adoption: Implications for Researchers, Practitioners, and Families (Sage Publications) and is on the editorial board for Adoption Quarterly. She co-chairs the St. John’s Biennial Adoption Initiative Conferences in New York City. She is a licensed psychologist with a clinical practice in Manhattan.

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When You're Not Looking [Jessica Sun Lee]
open to international adoptees and others

Through excerpts from a novel-in-progress, Jessica Sun Lee weaves the subconscious mind through the past and present. Exploring the fantasies and emotions of how she may have been conceived and abandoned, her work dives into dark places, on a quest for truth and a deep understanding of self. Her poems and paintings depict the frustration of having limited access to the past, and the increasing awareness of not fully belonging, but loving, and yearning to be loved. 

At 6 months old, Jessica Sun Lee was adopted from South Korea into an Irish-Italian American family in the suburbs of Boston, MA, that grew to include six siblings, all of which were biological to her parents. Raised in a predominantly white community, identity was always an internal struggle. She battled and disguised suicidal fantasies throughout most of her life. Music, art, and writing both brought to light and helped to heal the sources of her pain. Today, she is an Interactive Designer, a performing singer, songwriter, bassist and guitarist, working on a novel, and continuously writing poetry and painting.

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Korean Unwed Mothers & Adoptee Advocacy [Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Ph.D.]
open to international adoptees and others

This panel provides a current overview of adoptee/unwed mom advocacy occurring in South Korea to change institutionalized practices and perspectives privileging family separation over the development of socio-economic equality for unwed moms’ families, as well as Korean context in which to understand this advocacy’s structural challenges and implications. This panel is neither pro- nor anti-adoption, but rather it is a pro-mom discussion seeking to humanize unwed moms’ realities and points of political struggle that both moms and adoptees hold in common.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is an assistant professor of English and American Race and Multicultural Studies at St. Olaf College. Her writing includes Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press 2007), which received the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award and the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, and Song of a Mirror, a finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award, as well as critical articles, journalism, and libretti. She is currently working on a nonfiction book, Our Children, Our Hands, in collaboration with the Korean Unwed Mothers and Families Association (KUMFA) to describe unwed mothers' realities and serves as education and outreach director for Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK).

Andy Marra (panelist) is a Korean American adoptee and transgender woman. Currently, she is Co-Director of Nodutdol | 노둣돌, a progressive Korean organization invested in social justice, peace and reunification of the Korean peninsula. Marra is the former Senior Media Strategist for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation where she provided communications strategies for LGBT organizations throughout the U.S. and overseas. Marra has served on boards and advisory councils for the Human Rights Campaign, the Gay, Lesbian Straight and Education Network, the National Campaign to End the Korean War and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

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 Generations After Adoption: A Conversation with Adoptee Parents [Elizabeth Raleigh]
open to international adoptees and their partners only

The goal of the panel is to provide adult adoptees (parents or not) with the opportunity to explore how adoption may intersect with their roles as parents. Topics covered may include feelings about birthparents while pregnant and raising children, issues related to race and ethnicity, discussing adoption with your children, and parenting in interracial relationships. The panel will be interactive with plenty of time for questions and discussion with audience members. Adult international adoptees and their partners are welcome to attend.

Elizabeth Raleigh is completing her dissertation in adoption-related research in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is married to Nikos Raleigh and they have a two and a half year old daughter. 

Hollee McGinnis, MSW (panelist) is currently a doctoral student in the School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.  Previously, she served as the Policy Director at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.  She received her masters of science from Columbia University School of Social Work, where she concentrated in social welfare policy and international social welfare, and completed a post-masters' clinical social work fellowship at the Yale University Child Study Center. In 1996, she founded Also-Known-As, Inc.

Kacy Ames-Heron, LCSW (panelist) was adopted from Korea at 4 ½ months old.  She is a Psychotherapist in New York City and works with individuals, couples and families touched by adoption.  She resides in New York with her husband, 9 month old daughter and two dogs.

JaeRan Kim, MSW (panelist) is a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work. Her research interests are in adoption and child welfare and she has been published in the anthologies Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption and Religion and Spirituality in Korean America. JaeRan and her partner are the parents of two teenagers.

Nikos Raleigh, MBA and EdM (panelist) is a Director at the Global Client Group at American Express. He was adopted from Korea at one year old. He is married to Elizabeth Raleigh and he is the father of a two and a half year old daughter.

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Adoptees Without Birth Family: Why Are We Invisible? [Mirim Kim]
open to international adoptees and others

Since finding birth family is more unusual than not, why do narratives of search and reunion dominate any public discourse of adoption?  Why is the only discussion of adoptees without birth family relegated to “unsuccessful searches”?  Why are even adoption conferences absent of any representation of the majority of international adoptees who do not have contact with birth families?  This session will provide a space to think about, brainstorm, and discuss ways that our adoption community can more accurately reflect the reality of our experiences. 

Mirim Kim recently returned from an extended time living and working in South Korea, interacting with other adoptees, and being involved in various support work for single mothers, birth mothers, orphanage children, and children in residential facilities. The single most difficult part of her experience was the silent absence of any adult adoptee voices without birth family, and she is focusing her current research on advocacy for adult adoptees without connections to birth family.

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Becoming an Adult Adoptee in the Real World [ Annabel Schlossberg, Amanda L. Baden, Ph.D.]
open to international adoptees only

This workshop is being offered for young adult adoptees, ages 16-20 and will be facilitated by Amanda L. Baden, Ph.D.  Four adult adoptees will speak about their experiences leaving home, going to college, and creating identities as adult adoptees independent from their families and childhood friends.  Panelists will include both male and female adoptee speakers, 21 and over, from the United States.

 

Annabel Schlossberg has been a member of Also-Known-As since 2005, and on the Board of Directors since 2008. She has been involved with the Youth Mentorship Program since joining Also-Known-As, and has directed the program since 2008. Currently she is the Vice President of Also-Known-As. Annabel was adopted from Seoul, South Korea when she was three months old and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Annabel graduated from Binghamton University and currently works in the financial services industry.

 

Amanda Baden is an Associate Professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She was adopted from Hong Kong and raised in the US. Her research and clinical practice focus on adoption triad members, transracial/international adoption issues, racial and cultural identity, and multicultural counseling competence. Dr. Baden co-created a model of identity (Cultural-Racial Identity Model) for transracial/international adoptees. She is one of the editors of The Handbook of Adoption: Implications for Researchers, Practitioners, and Families (Sage Publications) and is on the editorial board for Adoption Quarterly. She co-chairs the St. John’s Biennial Adoption Initiative Conferences in New York City. She is a licensed psychologist with a clinical practice in Manhattan.

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Emerging Outwards: LGBTQQ Adoptee Narratives
open to international adoptees and others

As more adoption narratives are shared, new stories come forward that shed light on the complex intersections of identity. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQQ) adoptees face a different set of questions and concerns related to forming an identity and finding a sense of belonging. But experiences of LGBTQQ adoptees remain in the margins and often go unheard. This panel features an array of LGBTQQ adoptees who will share their experiences and perspectives in constructing identity, finding community and informing their beliefs in social justice.

 

Born outside Sài Gòn, Việt Nam, Anh Ðào Kolbe (panelist) came to the United States via New York City in 1972. She left two years later and grew up with her Greek and German parents in the Middle Eastern countries of Qatar and Oman. During April 2010, she returned to her motherland to document the reunion of forty-seven fellow Vietnamese adoptees from around the world.  This collection of photographs and interviews is an ongoing series titled Misplaced Baggage.

 

Andy Marra (panelist) is a Korean American adoptee and transgender woman. Currently, she is Co-Director of Nodutdol | 노둣돌, a progressive Korean organization invested in social justice, peace and reunification of the Korean peninsula. Marra is the former Senior Media Strategist for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation where she provided communications strategies for LGBT organizations throughout the U.S. and overseas. Marra has served on boards and advisory councils for the Human Rights Campaign, the Gay, Lesbian Straight and Education Network, the National Campaign to End the Korean War and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

 

Born in Seoul and raised in the Midwest, Min Matson (panelist) is a transgendered man residing in San Francisco, California. He works as a health care consultant specializing in operational, financial, and quality improvement. He is dedicated to improving access and quality of care provided to the queer community and serves as a leadership consultant for clinics serving transgendered and queer women. Min volunteers his time as an advocate for foster youth, and works to raise awareness of social issues through queer performance art in the form of dance and gender-fluid expression.

 

Pauline Park (panelist) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House. She led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002, and in 2005, became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations.

 

Peter Savasta (panelist) was adopted from Korea in 1976, and raised in Queens, NY. He is the Treasurer and a founding member of Korean Adoptees of Hawai'i.  He is also a founding member and former President of Also-Known-As.  Peter has been a member of several queer Korean organizations in New York City including Chingusai-NY, Iban-QKNY and has served on the advisory board of the Dari Project. He currently works as a web developer in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

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Identity Issues and Adoption [Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao]
open to international adoptees and others

This workshop is designed for all people involved in adoption - the identity issues explored pertain to the birth parents, the adoptive parents, and the adopted persons.  These issues are of great interest to any professional working in the world of adoption, as well as to birth siblings, spouses, and others in the extended family of adoption.

Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao is Founder and CEO of Center for Family Connections, in Cambridge and NY, Pre/Post Adoption Consulting Team, and is a lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her constant chant is that adoption is about finding families for children, not about finding children for families. She is a family therapist with empathy for all parties, and focus on the best interest of the child. Another mantra is that it takes a community to hold a family. She has experienced life as an adopted person, with love and great respect for both her birth and adoptive families.  

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Adoptee Voices Adoptee Voices: The Story of Today’s Young Adoptees
[Michael Tessier and Steve Kalb, MSW]
open to international adoptees and others

There’s a shift happening within the international adoption system and young Adoptees’ voices are at the center of it. With the help of adolescent and teenage Adoptees’ contemporary stories, thoughts and feelings, created through workshops during their time in an Adoptee Community, we can better inform worldwide adoption practices. We will utilize video, art, and stories from young Adoptees’ own hands and voices to show you into their world, how that may relate to your own experiences, and how those experiences are shaping our future as an Adoptee Community from within – changing and challenging adoption agencies and post adoption thinking. Their young voices are finally heard and are creating change. We want to share with you how.

Michael Tessier is a Korean American Adoptee and is in charge of Youth Adoptee programming at Holt International. In addition to his work in the Post Adoption Services department, he also creates new programming for young Adoptees across the country and offers training to adoptive parents. He has been involved with adoption camping and programming for over 15 years.

Steve Kalb is a Korean American Adoptee and is the Director of Holt International Adoptee Camp. In addition to his duties with Camp and program development for Post Adoption Service at Holt International, he also counsels and helps facilitate adult Adoptees’ birth searches. He is currently a PhD student at Portland State University’s School of Social Work.

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Attachment, Love & Couples: Themes in Couples Where One or Both Partners are Adopted
[Kacy Ames-Heron, LCSW]
open to international adoptees and others

This workshop will present a framework for understanding connection in couples and explore how the attachment experience of each member of the couple influences the relationship.  The workshop will look at how adoption may impact a person’s approach or needs in a relationship and themes that couples have presented where one or both of the members of the couple are adopted.  The workshop will present a theory of connection based on attachment models, discuss themes that may arise in couples and present vignettes of couples where adoption and attachment needs have impacted the relationship.

Kacy Ames-Heron was adopted from Korea at 4 ½ months old.  She is a Psychotherapist in New York City and works with individuals, couples and families touched by adoption.  She resides in New York with her husband, 9 month old daughter and two dogs.

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Locating Adoptee Scholars Within Korean Adoption Studies [Kimberly McKee]
open to international adoptees only

Recognizing that many Korean adoptees are engaged in Korean Adoption Studies, this panel reflects on the interventions of adoptee scholars in reshaping what constitutes knowledge within the field and disrupting existing scholarship concerning transnational adoption politics and practices.  As part of our work as insiders within the community, we are interested in sharing how our positionalities as adoptees is fraught with tension because we are asked to speak of our personal experiences instead of our academic research.  Panelists will discuss the establishment of Korean Adoption Studies and where we foresee new interventions occurring as more adoptee-authored scholarship is conducted.

Kimberly McKee is a doctoral student and graduate teaching associate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is currently examining Korean American adoptee autobiographical literature and Korean adoptees’ self-presentation on the Internet.  In 2009-2010, she conducted postgraduate research examining the ethno-cultural identities of Korean American adoptees in the Department of American Studies at King’s College London. She obtained her MSc Gender and Social Policy degree from the Gender Institute at the London School Economics, where she studied the Republic of Korea’s intercountry adoption practices and the status of women in Korea.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Ph.D. (panelist) is assistant professor of English and American Race and Multicultural Studies at St. Olaf College. Her writing includes Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press 2007), which received the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award and the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, and Song of a Mirror, a finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award, as well as critical articles, journalism, and libretti. She is currently working on a nonfiction book, Our Children, Our Hands, in collaboration with the Korean Unwed Mothers and Families Association (KUMFA) to describe unwed mothers' realities and serves as education and outreach director for Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK).

Nathan James Bae Kupel (panelist) received his Bachelors degree in Sociology and a certificate in Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  He authored a report on the Korean American community in Massachusetts, and a report that evaluates and assesses post-adoption services for Asian adoptees in the state.  He is the current President of Boston Korean Adoptees, inc., and is a student at the Graduate School of Social Work at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hollee McGinnis, MSW (panelist) is currently a doctoral student in the School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.  Previously, she served as the Policy Director at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.  She received her masters of science from Columbia University School of Social Work, where she concentrated in social welfare policy and international social welfare, and completed a post-masters' clinical social work fellowship at the Yale University Child Study Center. In 1996, she founded Also-Known-As, Inc.

Elizabeth Raleigh (panelist) is completing her dissertation in adoption-related research in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is married to Nikos Raleigh and they have a two and a half year old daughter. 

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Say My Name: The Fight Against International Adoption and Adoptees [Chun-Soon Li]
open to international adoptees and others

A couple years ago, Chun-Soon Li wrote an entry on her personal blog about changing her adoptive name, “Mary,” to her orphanage name, Chun-Soon. Re-posted on the Asian American forum 8asians.com, a melee ensued comprising over 140 heated comments in which the raw issues surrounding international, transracial adoption -- and adoptees -- were heatedly discussed. This interactive presentation highlights a few of the key responses to this post, followed by Q&A.

Chun-Soon Li is a classically trained artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is studying Art History at FIT and runs a pet care business she founded in 2009. Last summer, she gave birth to a daughter, Hana, who is teaching her to re-weave the threads of loss into a beautiful, brave future based on family, tenacity and hope.

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Naming Names Now: Writing Workshop for Adoptees & Allies [HyoSung Bidol-Lee, Esq.]
open to international adoptees and others

This is a participatory, interactive writing workshop for adoptees and allies to write about their names, and to share the stories that they create with each other.

HyoSung Jonathon Bidol-Lee was born in 1970, in Korea. On September 24, 1974, HyoSung and his birth sister were adopted to Holland, Michigan, and joined a younger Korean brother, who had been adopted previously in 1972, to make an American nuclear family with their white, middle class parents. In Dawn Star Search, a memoir in progress, HyoSung writes about his transracial, international adoption experience. HyoSung lives in New York City and works as the principal attorney of
Bidol-Lee Law, P.C., a law firm committed to “service for justice” for people.

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Film Screening
Time: 1:30PM-3:00PM

Operation Babylift w/Q&A [Jared Rehberg]
open to international adoptees and others

Operation Babylift was a $2 million U.S. initiative that airlifted over 2,500 Vietnamese orphans out of a war-torn country to protect them from the impending threat of the Communist Regime. Coined by some as “one of the most humanitarian efforts in history,” it was also plagued by lawsuits and political turmoil. Even with the best intentions, these adoptees grew up facing a unique set of challenges in America, including prejudice overshadowed by a controversial war and cultural identity crisis. Nearly 35 years later, this award-winning documentary takes a candid look at a significant, yet untold event as seen through the eyes of the volunteers, parents, and organizations directly involved, showing a contemporary look at Babylift and its relevance to international adoption today through the eyes of the adoptees themselves. Through honest and emotional testimonials, it uncovers the "lost" stories of the adoptees and who they have become as adults, revealing their compelling struggles and triumphs, and giving them an opportunity to share their journey from their own perspective and make peace with their controversial past.

Please see their website www.thebabylift.com

Panelists will include: Jared Rehberg, Tara Linh Leaman, and Anh Dao Kolbe

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Artist Exhibit
Time:  9:00am to 4:30pm (ongoing)

Misplaced Baggage: Same, Same, But Different [Anh Ðào Kolbe]

Misplaced Baggage: Same, Same But Different is a series of 47 intimate portraits of Vietnamese adoptees who grew up in within the US, UK, Europe and Australia. Misplaced Baggage increases awareness of the existence of the Vietnamese adoptee community by exposing the unique individuality of each of us and the ways in which we are more alike than unalike: we share the same blood line; we share our Vietnamese culture (whether reclaimed and/or reinvented); and our misplaced community is our own – a community just as important as other Asian communities.

Born outside Sài Gòn, Việt Nam, Anh Ðào Kolbe came to the United States via New York City in 1972. She left two years later and grew up with her Greek and German parents in the Middle Eastern countries of Qatar and Oman. During April 2010, she returned to her motherland to document the reunion of forty-seven fellow Vietnamese adoptees from around the world.  This collection of photographs and interviews is an ongoing series.

 

The Identity of Adoptees [Josiah Bell]

Josiah Bell creates stencils of adoptees that have agreed to let him portray their image and words through art. He wants the message of his artwork to reach as many adoptees as possible, as he believes that artistic representation of the adoptee experience is something that the adoptee community can relate to.  

Josiah Bell is a 24 year old independent artist that works out of Birmingham AL. His involvement with the adoptee community consists of six years working with Holt Adoptee Camp, as well as working three years with a culture camp out of Georgia. The majority of his artwork represents both the individual adoptee and the adoptee community through his own experiences.