2025 Summer Residents
The competitive summer residency program is fully subsidized.
Audrey Dahyung Oh
Audrey Dahyung Oh is a trans-media artist and community advocate creating interactive installations that redefine the relationship between technology and tradition. Rooted in a practice that blends physical computing, sensor-based systems, and speculative design, Oh explores East Asian folklore and superstition as dynamic terrain where public desires and modern taboos converge. Her work investigates what lies beyond scientific rationality, offering alternative, poetic solutions in spaces where modernity has left a vacuum. Audrey Oh is a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where she received the Tisch School of the Arts Scholarship. Her work has also been recognized by the Korean American Scholarship Foundation and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) at Columbia University. She is currently based in New York City. While in residence at Sunlit this summer, Audrey will be working on a project entitled "Offering II."
Tommy Kim
Tommy Kim is a high school English teacher living in Southern California. At Sunlit he will be revising his novel-in-progress about one family’s fate during “The Miracle on the Han River”—the period in the late 1960’s when Korea was transitioning from the fallout of civil war. As Seoul contended with dictatorship, the main character Suk-ja must negotiate family secrets, sexual abuse, and her beloved brother’s deployment to the Vietnam War. The novel explores the paradoxes of this miraculous time, when women found new opportunities financially and creatively but also struggled with traditional expectations. Secrets were integral to collective survival, and characters sacrificed for familial duty they longed to escape. Despite these bleak circumstances, the novel aims to reveal how even in such an oppressive patriarchal culture, women created their own freedom and agency, and even in the face of despair and darkness, love flourished. Tommy Kim’s writing has appeared in Joyland and The St. Petersburg Review. He is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and was a 2024 Periplus Fellow. He lives in the San Fernando Valley with his wife and two daughters.
Emily Sun Li
Emily Sun Li is a Chinese American writer, poet, and educator. She holds a dual MA/MFA in Children’s Literature and Writing for Children from Simmons University as well as an M.S. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her nonfiction chapter book The Good, the Bad, and the Fluffy: True Stories of Animal Troublemakers (Scholastic’s Clubs & Fairs) was published in Fall 2024, and her picturebook Mr. Chow’s Night Market (Penguin Workshop/Penguin Random House) is set for release in Spring 2026. Her poetry appears in Button Poetry, Molecule, and Rigorous, and her writing has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, Voyage YA Journal, and the City of Boston. While at Sunlit, Emily will be drafting a historical narrative picturebook exploring the "Lo Mein Loophole": and revising her novel Lucy Wang and the Dragon Resistance.
Candice Cho
Candice Cho is a policymaker, attorney, and advocate based in Los Angeles, California. The daughter of Korean immigrant parents, she is the first in her family to graduate from college and the first lawyer. During her residency, she will be working on a memoir-in-essays tentatively titled What Is More Time For, which uses thirty-five years of journaling to investigate the void left by the death of her father when she was 17 and the self that came to fill that void. Her other writing has appeared in laws for New York City, the State of California, and the United States. Candice graduated with her AB from Harvard College, MPP from Georgetown University, and JD from Columbia Law School, and is a 2025 Periplus Fellow.
Junchiro Ishida
Junichiro Ishida is a cross-disciplinary visual artist born in Kobe, Japan, based in the Bronx, New York. He holds a BA in Studio Art from Sonoma State University and an MFA in Two-Dimensional Media from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has presented his work in countries across the globe, including Brazil, France, Japan, Korea, and Nepal, and he regularly exhibits in New York City. During his residency at Sunlit, Jun will work on a series of paintings that call attention to the details and everyday magic of our natural environment, using symbols that have spiritual and reflective significance within Buddhism and other faiths, prompting viewers to contemplate our universal common ground as human beings.
Lynn E. Palermo
Lynn E. Palermo translates literary and academic works from French to English, with a primary interest in works by authors who explore questions of identity and social justice. During the residency, she will finish her translation of Poetics of the Hold, Variations on the Slave Ship (University of Chicago Press), by French-Caribbean writer and filmmaker Fabienne Kanor, who centers this poetic essay on the experience of the slave ship hold during the Middle Passage as a fundamental site of collective, haunting yet elusive memory for Afro-descendants the world over. Palermo previously translated two of Kanor’s novels, Humus (short-listed for the National Translation Award in 2021), and Old World (2025). She has received an NEA Translation Grant (2019), and an Albertine translation grant from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy to support her work. She is professor emerita of French Studies at Susquehanna University. From 2017-2023, she was a volunteer translator for UN-affiliated organizations.
Victoria Cho
Victoria Cho is a Korean American writer born and raised in the South. Her work explores the ancestral, spiritual, and homebuilding practices of the Korean diaspora. Victoria’s writing has appeared in the anthology Nonwhite and Woman (Woodhall Press 2022), Joyland, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, Apogee Journal, Word Riot, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, and Vermont Studio Center. At Sunlit, Victoria will conduct research and edit her debut novel manuscript, which follows a woman's search for the truth about her family during the Korean War, providing her with the ability to imagine a future for herself and those she loves. She lives in New York City.
Haeyoon Fry
Haeyoon Fry is a Korean American writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Sixfold, Hennepin Review, local zines, and she was a 2018-2019 Loft Literary Center Fellow. During her residency, she will be working on her essay collection, “Pasiphae Was a Mother: Adoption Stories as Personal Mythos,” a work which weaves her personal experience as an adoptee, the journals of her adoptive mother, and the oral stories of Korean American family members she has interviewed. Her work examines the disparate narratives of the Korean War, abortion rights in mid-century America, the history of foster care, sex work, and racialized medicine to create a comprehensive picture of how we arrived at our modern narrative surrounding the adoption of a child.
Angela Han
Angela Han is a Chinese-American multidisciplinary creator (artist, musician, educator, researcher, storyteller, curator) who builds speculative worlds through art, music, and storytelling. She weaves together research on various disciplines, including folklore, herstory,
and musicology, with reflections of her own lived experiences to create narratives that embody her hopes for the future. These stories are brought to life through intricate, multilayered paintings featuring rich, lyrical compositions. Her artwork has been exhibited at Arc Studios & Gallery, International Hotel Manilatown Center, Sanchez Art Center, SOMArts, and Voss Gallery. Han is the recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Artists Grant (2021) and California Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship (2023). She is a frequent Festival Artist at the United States of Asian America Festival hosted by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (2022, 2024, 2025). She currently serves as President of the Board of Directors at the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA). During Han’s residency, she will continue her “Realms of Courage: Celebrating Asian Women Composers” project that amplifies fifteen contemporary
composers who identify as Asian women through art, written reflections, and educational programming inspired by the composers’ music and lived experiences.
