Maria Yoon is a Korean-born artist who lives and works in New York City. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union. Maria is a recipient of the Alex Katz Tuition Award and a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Maria the Korean Bride has been funded in part by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NYC Cultural Affairs, Asian Women Giving Circle, and Franklin Furnace, amongst others. Her on-going journey across America has received significant attention from Korean and pan-Asian American communities, as well as from institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art. Maria the Korean Bride is fiscally sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt project. For more information please visit:http://www.mariathekoreanbride.com/

Moderator
Laurel Kendall (Ph.D. with distinction, Columbia 1979), is curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and Chair of the Anthropology Division at AMNH as well as Adjunct (full) Professor at Columbia University. She has written extensively about shamans, issues of gender, and the cultural construction of tradition and modernity in South Korea. Kendall recently published Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (University of Hawaii Press, 2009) describing changes in the Korean shaman world over 30 years acquaintance and an edited volume, Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodities, Tourism, and Performance (University of Hawaii Press, 2010). Kendall has authored or edited seven other books on Koreaof which Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life (University of Hawaii Press, 1985) and Getting Married in Korea: of Gender, Modernity and Consumption (University of California Press, 1996) are the best known. She first went toKorea in 1970 as a US Peace Corps Volunteer.