Speaker Bios
Takeo Rivera, PhD (he/him) is assistant professor of English at Boston University, where he is also core faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in African American & Black Diaspora Studies and American & New England Studies.
He is the author of Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity (Oxford UP 2022), which won the 2024 Honorable Mention for the Media, Performance, and Visual Studies Book Award with the Association for Asian American Studies.
His articles have been published in such journals as Amerasia, Performance Research, and ASAP/Journal, as well as the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media and Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education anthologies.
He is a former faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and is also a playwright whose work has been staged and read in New York City, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.
A publicly engaged scholar, Rivera has been interviewed for Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Wired, NBC, and Mic, among others, on a range of subjects regarding Asian American culture and politics.
Prior to attaining his PhD, Rivera worked as a rape crisis advocate, counselor, and educator in San Jose, CA.
Sameer Khan, M.D. (he/him), completed his residency in psychiatry at the Zucker Hillside Hospital, part of the Northwell-Hofstra School of Medicine. He went on to complete analytic training at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY), where he is now faculty. He has a full time psychoanalytic and psychotherapy practice in Midtown Manhattan.
Mary Kim Brewster, Ph.D (she/her). is a clinical psychologist, the Director of the Serious Mental Illness and the Family Project, and former faculty member, of the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York.
Her publications, and national and international presentations, address the impact of a serious mental illness on family well-being, clinical processes in systemic-relational therapy, and the effects of racial and gender marginalization, exclusion, and violence on couple and family relationships. Her current clinical research and writing focuses on the subjective experiences of Asian Americans in psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Dr. Brewster supervises the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at the City University of New York and has a private practice specializing in individuals, couples, and families.