I am an artist-researcher, educator, poet, and activist. I’m an immigrant from Taiwan—a contested spit of land with a long history of colonization. As the mother of two beautiful human beings, I struggle to pass on ancestral knowledge that I hang onto, by a very thin thread, worn thin by the mandate to assimilate. I’m learning to listen for the thread that resists the loud clamoring of a fossil-fuel dependent culture of capitalism, globalization, and neo-liberalism. Our world has been fractured and broken; I believe the stories of our ancestors, stories of young and old, from the wildly diverse corners of the world, need to be gathered together to restore cultures of care and love. I do the work of listening to and gathering stories in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, where I am the Program Director, and at the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living in Rhode Island. Though I currently live in Rhode Island, my soul migrates from shore to shore at regular intervals, touching down in rural Vermont, suburban Chicago, and coastal Port Townsend.
Ju-Pong Lin collects stories from her neighbors, makes art on her couch, in galleries and in theaters. Laundry, bread, and everyday stories are the seedlings for Ju-Pong’s interdisciplinary, socially engaged videos, participatory installations and performances. She received her MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa, and has shown her work nationally (Women in the Director’s Chair, Walker Museum of Art, and New York’s Mix festival.) She has taught media arts on the faculty of The Evergreen State College, and is currently the Program Director of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Ju-Pong lives in Rhode Island and parents two children, who school her in the practice of love and compassion every day.
As an artist, Ju-Pong fuses story circle, video, needlecraft, and community organizing to advocate for grassroots sustainability education and climate justice, in solidarity with indigenous movements to reclaim space.