Tag: Gala

Reliving the magic of our 13th Annual Gala!

We want to thank you all for your unwavering support and for making this night one for the books. We exceeded our donation goal in less than 15 minutes!! Truly a record time!! We couldn’t have done it without our amazing community. Cheers to an incredible evening!

We want to especially thank our trailblazer honorees Andrew Ahn, Joel Kim Booster, and Schuyler Bailar for sharing their Korean American story with us. It was an honor to celebrate them, thank you for creating space for our future generations.

Finally, a huge thank you to our Emcee Vivian Lee, Live Ask Host Kathleen Kim, and Musical Guest SuperKnova!

Celebrating our 12th Annual Gala in-person at Tribeca 360, NYC! We want to thank our honorees, Linda Lee, Sesame Street, and Esther Choi for being so vulnerable and sharing their Korean American story with us. You all deserve to be called trailblazers for your impact and contributions to our community!

It’s been two years since our last in-person gala and want to give a special thank you to all who came to support us and celebrate our community. We thank our honorees, TOKiMONSTA, Eugene Lee Yang, and Juju Chang for being so vulnerable and sharing their Korean American story with us.

Dear friends and supporters of KoreanAmericanStory.org,

We are eager to celebrate our 11th Annual Gala in-person after a year of not being able to see you! We would like to share the COVID-19 precautions we have instituted to ensure everyone attending feels safe and comfortable.

We thank and celebrate our honorees – Andy Kim, Kristen Kish, and Kyung B. Yoon – who shared their wonderful stories. A big thank you to our fantastic NYC Story Slam 2019 winners, Jen Kim and Claire Choi, our musical performer Year of the Ox, and our fabulous host Vivian Lee. We hope many of you can join us next year for our special 10th Anniversary! 

We thank our honorees, Tereza Lee, Joon H. Kim and Diana Son, who shared their wonderful stories. We give our heartfelt thanks to the Story Slam performers, Anthony Luckett and David Choi, who moved us to laugh and cry.

Special thanks to our honorees Martha Crawford, Jeannie Park, and Brian Tee for sharing their truly inspiring personal stories and to the incredible beatboxer and live-looper, Sung Lee, who amazed the audience.

We celebrated Trailblazer Honorees: Randall Park, Hooni Kim, and Aiyoung Choi and also featured rappers Awkwafina and John & Rick Lee. Due to a scheduling conflict, Randall Park was not able to receive his award in person. The story he shared via video will not be published in order to respect the actor’s wishes for it to remain private.

For our 2015 Annual Gala we honored the Korean American Trailblazers Sandra Oh, Jonathan “Dumbfoundead” Park, Thomas Park Clement and our Diamond Supporter honoree, Marja Vongerichten. The event took place at the lovely Tribeca Rooftop and hosted by talented and lovely Vivian Lee. Dan Phai was our auctioneer who was kind enough to fly out from Los Angeles to help us out!

The spirits were high at our 2014 Annual Benefit.  Each year we feature interesting Korean Americans who share their stories live, without script.  It is as much about the art of storytelling as it is about the content of their stories. This year, Dr. Agnes Rhee Ahn and Lt. Dan Choi hit the ball out of the park. Their storytelling captivated us and their stories challenged and inspired us to act to be the agents of change in our world. As you can see from these photos, it was a fun and inspiring evening.

KoreanAmericanStory.org’s Third Annual Benefit “Live Storytelling”, took place on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at the Central Park Boathouse. Our special Storytellers Eugenia Kim and Milton Washington, wowed the audience with their captivating storytelling performances.  The evening was filled with inspirational and emotional stories and the power of authentic narrative was evident.

KoreanAmericanStory.org held its inaugural fundraiser which was a Benefit Recital with David Kim, the Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, on June 4, 2011.  We had a diverse group of attendees who witnessed an amazing performance by David Kim accompanied by Gail Niwa on the piano.  David played 5 musical pieces, and in between each piece, he paused to share his story in a genuine and authentic manner that captivated the audience and moved them to laughter and tears simultaneously. As one attendee commented it was a “once-in-a-lifetime experience”.