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KAAC (Korean American Arts Council) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in New York, dedicated to presenting performing arts festivals and cross-cultural programs rooted in Korean artistic traditions.

Through our work, we support Korean American artists by creating platforms for their work to be seen, experienced, and recognized within a broader cultural and global context. We make both traditional and contemporary Korean arts accessible to diverse audiences, fostering dialogue across communities.

Your support directly sustains our artists, our programming, and our ability to expand access to meaningful cultural experiences. Every contribution helps us to deepen our impact and to continue building connections through the arts.

Join us in supporting Korean American artists and shaping a vibrant cultural landscape.

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Mahiya Sundar

Mahiya Sundar

Intern

Mahiya Sundar is an undergraduate student at Rutgers University who loves various forms of art. She has been persistent in perfecting her Bharathanatyam dance techniques and performs at numerous venues, continuing to pursue dance after her Arangetram. She has also been diligently learning Carnatic music ever since she was a child. She is currently studying Korean and is very enthusiastic and eager to learn more about Korean culture!
Kishan Patel

Kishan Patel

Program & Event Assistant

Kishan Patel is a music enthusiast and artist who produces and releases hip-hop music under the name Keyseye. A former member of RU RAGA, he competed in over 22 intercollegiate Raas and Garba competitions nationwide. He also has professional experience in human resources. He continues to write and record music while expanding his practice through tabla training under Ms. Jin Won. Outside of his artistic pursuits, he is committed to physical discipline and has a deep interest in history, philosophy, and spirituality.

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Lilian Nara Kim

Lilian Nara Kim

Marketing & Visual Content Manager

Lilian Nara Kim is a first-generation Korean-American designer passionate about crafting live immersive experiences that blend storytelling, technology, and theatre. As a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Lilian has studied both Scenic and Media Design, gaining a multidisciplinary perspective on theatrical design. With a skill set spanning across disciplines, she specializes in bringing stories to life through innovative, immersive design.
Based primarily in Los Angeles, she aspires to contribute to projects that celebrate her culture and community.
Outside of design, you can find Lilian exploring pop-up shops around the city or tackling yet another ambitious DIY project she discovered on Pinterest—whether she finishes it is another story….
Jaemin park

Jaemin Park

Treasurer

Jaemin Park is a lighting designer and educator whose work explores the relationship between light, music, and storytelling. He serves as a Lighting Design Advisor for the Korean American Arts Council and as an Assistant Professor of Lighting and Sound Design at Southern Illinois University. He is also a member of United Scenic Artists, Local USA 829.
With a background in vocal performance and music education, Park brings a strong musical sensibility to his design practice. He earned an MFA in Lighting Design in the United States and completed additional doctoral coursework in Performing Arts. His work integrates rhythm, structure, and emotional nuance, treating light as an expressive language that enhances narrative and atmosphere.
Since beginning his career in 2005 with the opera La Traviata, he has designed over 150 productions across theatre, musical theatre, opera, and dance. His work spans the United States—including New York, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri—and extends internationally to South Korea, Nigeria, and Cambodia.
His work has been recognized with the 2023 Jonathan Resnick Lighting Design Award from USITT, and featured in the USITT Design Expo and Theatre Design & Technology magazine. In 2025, he was selected for the USITT Training Ground × Cirque du Soleil program in Las Vegas, receiving a scholarship for artistic excellence.

Mike Lukshis

Treasurer

Classical tabla soloist and accompanist Mike Lukshis has established himself as a leading tabla performer and educator in the NYC area. He is regularly sought after for his kathak accompaniment by artists across the US. With 20 years of direct, gurukul style training by Guruji Pandit Divyang Vakil, Mike is continuously imbued with the living tradition of tabla. Through his ongoing tutelage, Mike is carrying forward the Delhi and Ajrada Gharanas, or schools of tabla, to the future generations. He is a lead performer of several groups such as contemporary classical tabla ensemble Talavya and the experimental electronic trio TablaTun. As well, He is the co-director of the renowned Taalim School of Indian Music and an executive board member for non-profit organizations Taalim Foundation and Anga Kala Dance Company.

Hayana Kim

Hayana Kim

Secretary

Hayana Kim is an interdisciplinary performance and media historian of twentieth and twenty-first century South Korea. Teaching in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the Ohio State University, she received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University. Her research centers on cultures of democracy in contemporary South Korea. Her teaching is at the intersections of Korean studies, Asian diasporic studies, and theatre, performance, and media studies. She writes both in Korean and English, with her publications that have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, and in edited collections published with the Cambridge University Press, Chonnam National University (in Korean), among others. Currently, she is the Vice President/AAP Conference Planner for Association of Asian Performance (2025-27).
Jin Won

Jin Won

Founder - Artistic Director

Jin Won is a celebrated Kathak dancer and tabla player whose work bridges tradition and innovation through rhythm and movement. Hailed by The New York Times as “an exuberant dancer whose musicality transforms her dancing into something primal,” she has built a career that spans performance, education, curation, and cross-cultural collaboration.

Born in South Korea, Jin trained in India for over 15 years under Pandit Divyang Vakil (tabla) and Shrimati Shubha Desai (Kathak), representing the Delhi, Punjab, and Ajrada gharanas in her tabla performances. She is the Artistic Director of Pradhanica Dance and Music Company and Director at the Taalim School of Indian Music (NJ), where she trains the next generation of Indian classical artists. Her performances have been featured at major venues such as the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center Atrium, and Carnegie Hall, alongside teaching residencies and master classes at universities and cultural institutions.

As Curator of the Erasing Borders Dance Festival and President of the Korean American Arts Council, Jin fosters artistic exchange and community engagement, supporting both traditional and contemporary artists. She has been recognised with a New York State Assembly Citation for her cultural leadership and contributions to the arts.

Guruji Pandit Divyang Vakil

Guruji Pandit Divyang Vakil

Internationally acclaimed Indian rhythm maestro

Guruji Pt. Divyang Vakil is an internationally acclaimed Indian rhythm maestro, a revered Taalvidya Guru and spiritual guide whose works emphasize the three major aspects of Spirituality: Music, Knowledge, and Yoga.

He is known globally for his intricate rhythm compositions, teaching excellence and intensive work upon the secret Taandav compositions. Traveling across 40 countries around the globe, he has invested over 20 years carrying out intensive research upon one of the vastly ignored subjects by mankind – the topic of death and the art of dying.
His Taalvidya program focuses on the rhythmic aspects of Kathak dance; one of the most celebrated classical dance forms of India. Understanding these rhythmic patterns gives an artist the necessary insight into the fundamental structure of the art form and opens up numerous possibilities for a dancer to explore. He is currently mentoring over 1000 kathak dancers, professional artists and teachers across the world.
In his expansive teaching career of over 45 years, he has produced innumerable music professionals and taught thousands across the world. Nearly 2 decades ago, Guruji founded the Taalim School of Indian Music in New Jersey, a premier tabla school and Indian performing arts organization in the northeastern United States, and through its 20 years of history building a community that spans the entire United States, Taalim has helped to weave the Indian classical tradition into this land.
Lim Dongchang (Im Dong-chang)

Lim Dongchang (Im Dong-chang)

Composer and a Pianist

Lim Dongchang is a composer and a pianist of unparalleled artistry, who has carved out his own musical genre, deeply rooted in the DNA of Korean music. With a mastery of Western classical, contemporary, Korean traditional, jazz, and world music, he is a visionary artist who seamlessly blends the essence of Korean music with other genres or unveils it in entirely new forms.
He created HUHTEUN GARAK [hətn ɡɑrɑk], a revolutionary music that is both a methodology and a genre in itself, publishing it in 2009. Meaning “freely scattered melodies” in Korean, HUHTEUN GARAK is a music of absolute freedom —like the wind, unbound by time and space. (In 2020, Edwin Kim presented a doctoral dissertation on Lim Dongchang’s HUHTEUN GARAK at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.)
In 2012, he unveiled the Lim Dongchang PIATGO, a reimagined piano crafted to embrace the spirit of Korean traditional music. That May, he performed Junggwangjigok on PIATGO I (designed for traditional court music), followed by Choi Ok-sam Style Gayageum Sanjo in October on PIATGO II (for traditional folk music). The PIATGO, with its uniquely designed action mechanism, resonates with a raw, multidimensional timbre—capturing the elemental voice of metal strings in their purest form.
Yong Suk Yoo

Yong Suk Yoo

Advisory

Yong Suk Yoo is a Korean-born, US-based theater director and educator. As an associate professor of directing at the John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University, his work explores the intersection of live performance, digital media, and transcultural storytelling. Blending mythological and folkloric imagination with contemporary technology, he challenges traditional narrative structures and engages audiences as active participants. His artistic practice reimagines transnational identities and pushes the boundaries between Eastern and Western aesthetics in innovative theatrical forms.
Walter Byongsok Chon

Walter Byongsok Chon

Advisory

Walter Byongsok Chon is a dramaturg, critic, translator, educator, and scholar from South Korea. He is the Associate Professor of Dramaturgy at Ithaca College in the US and, for the academic year 2023-2024, was a Visiting Professor at Korean National University of Arts. Dramaturgy: Yale Rep, Yale School of Drama, O’Neill Center, Great Plains Theater Conference, Hangar Theatre, Civic Ensemble, and New York Musical Festival. Co-author of Dramaturgy: The Basics (Routledge, 2023, with Anne M. Hamilton). Publications in: Review, Praxis, The Korean National Theatre Magazine, The Korean Theatre Review, The Mercurian, Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, the volumes The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy and Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy: Case Studies from the Field. Co-managing editor for South Korea for the online global theatre journal The Theatre Times. Recipient of 2022 Daesan Foundation Translation Grant and Spring 2024 Bogliasco Fellowship. D.F.A: Yale School of Drama.
Prof. Kee-Yoon Nahm

Kee-Yoon Nahm

Founder-President

Kee-Yoon Nahm is Visiting Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. He works as a dramaturg and theatre translator in the United States and South Korea. His translations have been presented at the National Theatre Company of Korea, the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Vaeda Theatre, Illinois State University, Texas State University, Coalescence Theatre Project, and Yale Cabaret. His dramaturgy work includes productions at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Significant Productions, TheatreWorks Colorado Springs, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, Yale Cabaret, the Korean National Gugak Center, and the National Dance Company of Korea. From 2019 to 2024, he was the Chair of the Crossroads Project at Illinois State University, which operated the Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative, a new play development program for BIPOC playwrights. His academic publications include articles in journals such as Theater, Performance Research, Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, among others, as well as the anthologies Towards a Just Pedagogy of Performance, Realisms in East Asian Performance, Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, and Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture. He is on the editorial board of Asian Theatre Journal, where he reviews submissions on Korean theatre and performance.