Our People

Core Team

Director

David Delgado Shorter, PhD

Assistant Director

Hanna Olivia Young

Lead Programmer/Designer

Harvey Nguyen

Legacy

Original Programmer

Michael Lynch

Data Management Team (2019 - 2020)

Ariel Hahn

Alyssa Tou

Joyce Wang

Icon Artist

Alberto Lerdo

Machine Learning

Dave Shepherd

UCLA Research and Instructional Technology Consultant

Benjamin Niedzielski

Faculty Innovation Fellowship/Startup Consultants

Deanna Evans

Keith Gibson

Robert Jado

K-Town Archive Collaborative

In 2024, we started working with the Koreatown Storytelling Program on a series of workshops, oral history projects, and cultural mapping projects centered around health and community wellness. We took particular care to learn how the residents of Koreatown, a district in Los Angeles, relied on traditional healing practices, food, and performances to negotiate personal and collective health. In 2026, we saw the fruits of our labor with the premier of the first "sister site" of the Archive of Healing: The K-Town Archive. We reached our goal through the hard work of many and the focus of a smaller group.

Katherine Yungmee Kim

Katherine Yungmee Kim is a writer, journalist, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the author of “Longitude” (Datz Press, 2021) and “Los Angeles’s Koreatown” (Arcadia Publishing, 2010), and serves as program director of the Koreatown Storytelling Program and creator of the K-Town is Your Town community photo project at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, the nation’s oldest and largest Korean American nonprofit.

She has worked extensively in immigrant communities, editing Izote Vos, a collection of Salvadoran American writing and visual art, and Quietly Torn, a literary journal by Young Iu Mien American women, both with Pacific News Service. Her community journalism projects have been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, California Humanities, California Community Foundation, Eisner Foundation, and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, among others. For her intergenerational work, she was a 2021 encore.org Gen2Gen Innovation Fellow and a member of the Generations United Advisory Group on Diverse Intergenerational Programs.

Dilan Askew

Dilan Askew is the Koreatown Storytelling Program Coordinator. She was born in Los Angeles and raised in Tacoma, Washington.

She returned to L.A. to attend school at Occidental College, where she was the Director of FEAST, a student-run organic garden, and graduated with a major in comparative studies in literature and culture and an urban and environmental policy minor. She has always found herself drawn to the art of storytelling and the important role it plays for individuals and culture. She hopes to create spaces where listening to and telling stories is accessible for all.

Rachel Kim

Rachel Kim is a Los Angeles-based graphic designer and sign painter who translates oral histories into physical media. Her work ranges from murals and environmental design to digital archives and book design. Previously, she collaborated with the Kounkuey Design Initiative on award-winning urban planning and landscape design projects.

Her extensive partnership with KYCC and KSP includes initiatives like the K-Town Atlas, Legacies of Western Ave, Traditional Healing Arts, and the K-Town Archive. Rachel holds a BA in Design Media Arts from UCLA, plays in two bands, and has three perfect cats.

Lisa Ryou

Lisa is currently pursuing her MSLIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she previously earned her M.Ed. She received her BA in History and American Culture from the University of Michigan. Lisa is passionate about the history of minority groups in the U.S., inclusive curriculum development, community archives, and oral histories.

She is grateful for the opportunity to work on the Koreatown Storytelling Program and explore the history of Koreatown and its residents. She has worked on a variety of oral history projects focused on enhancing access to oral history collections. As a second-generation Korean American, she felt a particular connection to the project and hopes to continue sharing the stories of Korean Americans across the U.S.

Syed Mohammad Easin

Syed Easin is a UI/UX designer and web developer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He designed and developed the K-Town Archive website, crafting the visual identity and interface in Figma and bringing it to life with Next.js, including the archive's content dashboard. Working with clients across the US, UK, and Europe, he specializes in building websites for organizations that put people and stories first, and he believes good design should stay quiet so the content can speak.

Collaborating across continents on the K-Town Archive, he found a familiar thread in Koreatown's story, one of community, memory, and belonging, that reminded him of his own neighborhood back home. When he is away from the screen, he enjoys films from around the world and spending time with his wife and young child.

Katie Fang

Katie Fang is a Chinese/Korean American artist and designer who is passionate about the intersection of creative design and storytelling. With a B.A. from UCLA's department of World Arts & Cultures, she explores how the transformative language of art is a means of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural connection. Through her craft of drawing and visualizing worlds beyond colonial paradigms, her work imagines a more regenerative and tender future.

Harvey Nguyen

Harvey Nguyen....

Advisory Board

Our advisory board assists our administrative team in directing the site toward a promising future. Board members meet approximately twice a year to help the director make executive decisions pertaining to the site’s function, mission, and maintenance of the site’s data. Some advisory board members provide guidance for card reviewers, helping resolve ethical concerns that might arise regarding the data points. Board members are sometimes asked to meet directly in small group discussions (remotely) to help the site administrators with matters pertaining to fundraising, grant writing, site functionality, and data review.

If you would like to join members of our advisory board, please contact us using the form on this site. In your email, please include a four to five sentence statement of interest, a single URL that reflects your professional experience, and a resume/CV. Board members serve for three years under normal circumstances and may be asked to continue without re-election.

Degenhart Brown

Degenhart Brown is a seventh-year Ph.D. candidate in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Degenhart received a BA in Anthropology from UCLA in 2016 and an MA in Culture and Performance from UCLA in 2019. Degenhart’s MA thesis, which spanned five years of ethnographic research in the United States, Mexico, and Nigeria, focused on the ways in which members of the Los Angeles-based Holy Superet Light Church pursued spiritual healing through sacred art veneration. Degenhart’s present doctoral research focuses on the roles that animals and power objects play in West African healthcare. UCLA Graduate Students

Carole H. Browner

Research Professor, Departments of Anthropology and Gender Studies, and Center for Culture and Health, UCLA Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

Carole Brower’s research has focused principally on the politics of reproduction in its diverse contexts from the micro and mid-level to the macro. Publications include the multi-prize-winning collection, Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives (Duke). Interest in the social impact of decoding the human genome led her to investigate genetic testing for neurology care. Our co-authored monograph, with H. Mabel Preloran, Neurogenetic Diagnoses, the Power of Hope, and the Limits of Today’s Medicine (Routledge), considers the meanings and impacts of genetic diagnoses for patients living with fatal neurodegenerative diseases, their family caregivers, and their clinicians. Her current projects include an interdisciplinary collaboration on Mexican health care reform and field research with indigenous and nonindigenous rural Mexican women on the meanings of gender and self-actualization. UCLA Faculty Description

J.W.Dotson, MD

I graduated from the UCLA School of Medicine and completed my psychiatry training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.
My interests include all aspects of traditional healing, but especially ethnobotany, humoral theory and astrological medicine from Classical Antiquity through the Renaissance.
In addition my focus is on olfaction: sensory studies, cultural and anthropological aspects of smell as well as the histories of alchemy, distillation and perfumery as used for creating aromatic medicines.

Edgar Fabián Frías, MA, MFA (candidate), LMFT

Edgar Fabián Frías, MA, MFA, LMFT is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, psychotherapist, and curator whose work engages Indigenous Futurisms, queer and trans studies, and digital culture. Working across installation, performance, video, and computational media, their research-based practice explores the intersections of technology, spirituality, and collective healing. Drawing on their Wixárika lineage and training in clinical mental health counseling, Frías examines how ancestral practices such as divination, dreamwork, and ceremony can be brought into dialogue with contemporary systems including data infrastructures. Their work foregrounds questions of data justice, decolonial methodologies, and relational ways of knowing, positioning art as a form of knowledge production and speculative world-building. Frías holds degrees from UC Riverside, Portland State University, and UC Berkeley, and is currently Special Faculty in Performance at CalArts. Edgar's Website

Dr. David Gere, Professor, UCLA

Professor, UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance, Founder and Director, UCLA Art & Global Health Center.
David Gere, Ph.D., is founding director of the UCLA Art & Global Health Center and is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. His book "How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS" received the award for outstanding book publication from the Congress on Research in Dance. He has co-curated a trilogy of AIDS exhibitions—"MAKE ART/STOP AIDS" (2008), "The A.R.T. Show" (2011), and "Through Positive Eyes" (2016)—the latter of which is also the title of his just-released co-edited photo-storytelling book. "Through Positive Eyes"

Tamsin Lee, DA[o]M, AEMP

Tamsin Lee, DA[o]M, EAMP, LAc, is a Daoist metaphysical expert who fuses her background in Traditional Chinese Medicine, community-engaged research, and creative somatic embodiment. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National Institutes of Health at the University of Washington and Kaiser Permanente. She has also been recognized by TEDMed, the American Public Health Association, and Well+Good's Health and Wellness Changemakers. Dr. Lee’s current work focuses on teaching the alchemical initiation of perimenopause and guiding women into a deeper relationship with their cycles and personal evolution. Dr. Tamsin Lee Website

Candy Martinez

Candy Martínez is an Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program at Vassar College. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American and Latinx Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from Amherst College. Her research analyzes the emotional injuries and epistemologies of Zapotec and Mixtec communities as they relate to migration, gender violence, and social changes. As someone with Zapotec roots, her research stems from a commitment to expanding the language of emotional wellness beyond pathologies and incorporating the value of Indigenous knowledge to rethink healing and emotional distress. She has most recently been a School for Advanced Research Andrew W. Mellon Fellow.

Rebecca Niday

Rebecca Niday is a writer, editor, entrepreneur and seeker of wisdom. She spends much of her time with her 4yo Chocolate Lab Emma Brown D'Vinci, exploring the forests of the PNW.

Saewon Oh, healing artist

Saewon Oh is an interdisciplinary artist, healing practitioner, plant medicine educator, ceremonialist, herbalist and founder of Sun Song, an embodied research ritual lab exploring the intersections of plant, human and planetary consciousness through vibrational earth essence therapy. Her performances and workshops have been hosted by The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 2220 Arts, Hammer Museum, LA Phil, Current:LA, ICA SF and Golden Dome School. She is 1/4 of Hwa Records who are currently ICA LA Artists in Residence (2025-2026) at the ICA LA who will culminate in a group performance and ritual exploring fire, anger and healing within the Korean diaspora.
Sun Song, Saewon's Instagram

David Shorter, Professor (UCLA)/Director of Archive of Healing

Dr. David Delgado Shorter is Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles. The author of an award-winning book and the recipient of the University's top teaching award, Dr. Shorter has created three digital publications, produced and directed an ethnographic film, and curated art exhibits both on-line and in Los Angeles. In 2016, Shorter became the Director of the Archive of Healing, a database of medicinal folklore from around the world. The database is drawn from six university archives, over 3,200 books, and over thirty years of first hand and second hand anthropological data, spanning seven continents. His scholarly articles focus on the search for ET intelligence, sexuality, performing geography, research methodologies particularly ethnography, and settler science. Dr. Shorter has been certified as having been attuned to Gokui Kaiden, the highest level of Gendai Reiki Ho, by Hiroshi Doi Sensei (Ashiya, Japan). https://www.davidshorter.com

Mary Warner

Mary Warner is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, researcher, and author exploring the intersections of healing, ecology, and spirit. She advocates for an intermedicinal approach—a framework she coined to describe healing that flows between the planet, the human, and the more-than-human world. With a background in executive brand strategy and two decades of experience in the creative sectors, Mary brings a unique, narrative-focused perspective to medical practice and research. Her work is deeply rooted in classical lineages and contemporary, place-based inquiry. Mary Warner Website

Michelle Wong

Michelle Wong is a physician of Traditional Chinese Medicine, licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, and is fascinated by all things related to skin. Michelle’s own journey in health began at age 4, when she was enlisted to massage her grandmother who had just arrived from the Philippines. The nightly ritual had relieved her of symptoms of emphysema, and she declared the young Michelle gifted with “Hilot” hands.In her practice, Michelle combines cutting edge technology with ancient wisdom, and practical advice for modern day living. She utilizes gentle acupuncture techniques for pain relief, hormonal balance, emotional & facial rejuvenation. As a permaculture designer and ecovillager, she values local herbs and co-leads hikes in Southern California to teach how she uses Chumash medicine in her clinic.

Ms. Wong is also a long time resident of Koreatown, where she has participated in the intentional healing of the community & land. As a member of the LA Ecovillage, she helped found the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust, saved over 50 affordable housing units, and established community gardens in the most dense & urban neighborhood. The White House Place Learning garden still shelters the sage, toyon as well as nutritious apples, tomatoes and chard that feeds her belly & spirit. With her recent collaboration with Metabolic Studios, the Meandros tower of virgin soil is performing land acupuncture. Bringing back the native vegetation from the dormant seeds, and healing our relationship with the soil, water, and wildlife that coexists in Ktown.
Better Angels Acupuncture

Amanda Yates Garcia, Oracle of Los Angeles

Amanda Yates Garcia is a writer, witch, and the Oracle of Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The LA Times, The SF Chronicle, The London Times, The Millions, The Believer, O Magazine, CNN, Salon, Bust, Bravo, as well as a viral appearance on FOX. She has led rituals, classes and workshops on magic and witchcraft at UCLA, UC Irvine, MOCA Los Angeles, Cal Arts, The Hammer Museum, LACMA, The Getty, Human Resources, MOCA Tucson and many other venues. Amanda hosts the popular Between the Worlds podcast, and her first book, _Initiated: Memoir of a Witch_, came out in October 2019 through Grand Central / Hachette and has been translated into six languages.<em>word</em> Mystery Cult with Amanda Yates Garcia, Oracle of Los Angeles Instagram

Hanna Young, Assistant Director of the Archive of Healing

Hanna Young is the Assistant Director of the Archive of Healing and participated in preliminary reviews of the Archive’s data. In June of 2021, Hanna completed her undergraduate studies at UCLA. Hanna’s research at UCLA has focused on linguistic strategies for healing in the context of colonialism and self concept. Hanna has also explored the high degrees of empathy demonstrated by people living with psychiatric health conditions. Hanna’s largest research project to date, supervised by Dr. David Shorter, focuses on community marginalization, food insecurity, and manifestations of eating disorder pathologies. Through storytelling and ethnographic methods, her work highlights the racial, religious, and class-based factors that interfere with diagnosing eating disorders and personalizing healing interventions.

In May of 2023, Hanna completed her master’s of science degree in Clinical Psychiatric Social Work at Columbia University, where she focused on the racialization of substance use and the healing benefits of psychedelic substances. In her clinical fieldwork, Hanna provided psychotherapy to individuals and families with varied psychiatric diagnoses, at both outpatient and inpatient levels of psychiatric care.

Hanna is currently earning her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University of Biobehavioral Sciences. Her clinical and research work is focused on psychotic spectrum illnesses, furthering multicultural understandings of mental health and developing culturally sensitive care, and working to remove race and socioeconomic barriers to care.

Lonnie Zeltzer, MD

Lonnie Zeltzer, MD, is a UCLA Emerita Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and prior Founder/Director of the UCLA Pediatric Pain and Palliative Care Program. She was an invited member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Pain Care, Research, and Education and co-author of the IOM report, Transforming Pain in America. She has received many awards related to her pain research (including research on yoga, acupuncture, and hypnotherapy), clinical pain programs, and her cancer research, as well as serving on invited committees for the NIH, CDC, FDA, and national pain societies. She has over 400 publications, including books for the public, “Pain in Children and Young Adults: the Journey back to Normal” (Zeltzer and Zeltzer, Shilysca Press, Inc., 2016; "the Smart Brain Pain Syndrome", Weston, Zeltzer, and Zeltzer; Shilysca Press, Inc 2021). She and her husband Dr Paul Zeltzer spent 15 summers in Ireland for a camp for kids with cancer from around the world, and Dr. Lonnie taught kids yoga, self-hypnosis, meditation, and Chi Gong. She also set up a "massage day" for the campers. She founded “Creative Healing for Youth in Pain” ( www.mychyp.org ) that provides online pain and related education, peer support, and mind-body experiences for youth in pain and for their parents/caregivers, with CHYP becoming increasingly international. CHYP provides a free 2 week online summer camp in mid-July that involves a variety of self-healing workshops from different traditions of healing and creative arts. Creative Healing for Youth in Pain