MOCA Queer StoryJAM #6 - Icon

About the event

We celebrate the present while honoring those who came before us—ancestors, trailblazers, and everyday figures who have shaped who we are. From pop stars to activists, from chosen family to beloved mentors, we are surrounded by icons who inspire us, guide us, and offer both counsel and care. MOCA Queer StoryJAM returns for another intimate and powerful gathering, amplifying the voices of queer Asian Americans through storytelling. This time, we explore ICON—those who shape how we see ourselves and those who continue to inspire who we are becoming. Through personal narratives, LGBTQ+ Asian American storytellers will reflect on kinship, friendship, care, and collective resilience. Following the storytellers, audience members are invited to share their own stories. Join us for an evening of storytelling, reflection, and connection—where sisterhood is reimagined, reclaimed, and celebrated together. ABOUT Storytellers Fortune Cookie Fortune Cookie is a native New Yorker born in Chinatown. She is a burlesque performer, writer and producer of the quarterly show at Caveat called “Books and Burlesque.” She is inspired by female superheroes in Asian folklore and mythology, as well as global resistance movements and incorporates acrobatics and projections in her performances. Frankie/Bingxin Yu Frankie/Bingxin Yu is a queer, non-binary Chinese movement practitioner, performance artist, and fitness educator whose interdisciplinary practice integrates physical training, somatic movement research, and performance art. Their work examines the body movement as a site of cultural memory, trauma, and transformation. Through sculptural physical language and embodied storytelling, they investigate healing, repression, and resilience—positioning performance and movement as tools for ritual practice, collective care, and expanded representations of queer and diasporic identity within contemporary cultural discourse. Dawei Chen Dawei Chen (he/him) is a Taiwan-born, queer Asian immigrant playback theatre performer and drama therapist based in Brooklyn, New York. He centers his clinical work on cultivating mutuality with the communities he serves through the power of arts and creativity. He has experience working with individuals across the lifespan and currently practices in an inpatient psychiatry unit at a hospital in Brooklyn. Dawei has extensive experience performing playback theatre with several ensembles, including Big Apple Playback Theatre, NYC Queer Playback Theatre, and New York Mandarin Playback Theatre. Emilie Liu Emilie Liu is a Taiwanese artist born in Taipei and based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work begins with feeling, the kind that lives beneath language, in the body before it reaches words. Through dog characters inspired by her own dog, Jupiter, abstract water, and the visceral interplay of color and texture, she builds a visual language for emotional states that resist being named. Each painting is a vessel: for grief, for tenderness, for the quiet ache of being present. Liu's practice is an invitation to turn inward, and to find, within still yet fluid colors and textures, the hidden feelings we have always carried within.