Opening Event: Becoming Asian American

Mary Kim Brewster is the Director of the Families and Serious Mental Illness Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family and supervises in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at the City University of New York. She has written and presented nationally and internationally on clinical processes in family therapy and on the impact of racial and gender marginalization, discrimination, and violence on couple and family relationships. Dr. Brewster has a private practice in New York City. 

David L. Eng is a writer, teacher, and scholar of psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and queer studies. He is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and the Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Eng is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is given to a scholar or activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. Eng is the author, most recently, of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han) and is completing a book, “Reparations and the Human,” which investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia. 

Jasmine Khor works in a private practice setting in San Francisco, with a focus on youth and adults with a history of (im)migration. She grew up in Hong Kong, fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Her avid curiosity in poetry and literature has shaped her listening between cultural discourses and meanings that are left behind. Her clinical experiences with inter-generational grief, rehabilitation, death and dying heavily informs her work surrounding migration, language and absence. 

Usha Tummala-Narra is a clinical psychologist and the Director of Community-Based Education at the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute and Research Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Her research and scholarship focus on immigration, trauma, race, and culturally-informed psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She is also in Independent Practice, and works primarily with survivors of trauma from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Dr. Tummala-Narra is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and the Asian American Journal of Psychology. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Theory and Cultural Competence in Psychotherapy (2016) and the editor of Trauma and Racial Minority Immigrants: Turmoil, Uncertainty, and Resistance (2021), both published by the American Psychological Association Books.