Curator’s Choice Lecture | McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers

Natasha Reichle is a curator of Southeast Asian Art at the Asian Art Museum. She holds a BA in Literature from Yale University and an MA and PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her academic background is in the Hindu, Buddhist, and early Islamic art of Indonesia. Her most recent exhibitions have examined provenance and the circulation of works of art. These include: Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities, Lost at Sea: Art Recovered from Shipwrecks, and Philippine Art: Collecting Art, Collecting Memories. She curated the first major U.S. exhibition on the arts of Bali, Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance. Her dissertation and subsequent book (Violence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Art of Indonesia, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007) focused on the late Buddhist sculpture and architecture of Java and Sumatra.

Doan Bui is a writer and journalist, currently in San Francisco as a resident at Villa Albertine. She was awarded the Prix Albert Londres for her work about refugees. Her memoir Le silence de mon père (2016) won the Prix Littéraire de la Porte Dorée. Her most recent work, the novel La tour (Éditions Grasset, 2022), was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. With Ukrainian writers Pavlo and Viktoriya Matyusha, she wrote Lettres d’amour et de Guerre (2023). She also composes music for artistic performance and loves to karaoke in Vietnamese.

Vu Tran is the author of Dragonfish and a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His other writing has appeared in publications like The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007: The Best Stories of the Year, The Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his Ph.D. from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. He is an associate professor of practice in the arts at the University of Chicago, where he directs undergraduate studies in creative writing. 

Pre-order McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers before your visit and pick up your purchase at the Cha May Ching Boutique on the day of the event.

Featuring work by:
Doan Bui, Thi Bui, H’Rina DeTroy, Anna Moï, Hoài Huong Nguyen, Vaan Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Bao Phi, Paul Tran, Vu Tran