Katarina Wong is a writer, artist, and curator. With a Cuban mother and Chinese father, she is the first generation of her family born in the U.S. Her writing and her artwork merge themes from these cultures as a way to understand the immigrant experience and her cultural inheritances.
Katarina’s writing has been published in numerous outlets including The Miami Herald, The New York Daily News, Entrepreneur, as well as literary journals, academic publications, and art blogs (see the Writing section for links to her pieces). Katarina is currently working on a memoir about how a renovation in Cuba led her to reconnecting with her cultural heritages.
Katarina's artwork has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Chinese American Museum and California African Art Museum, both in LA as part of the 2017 Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, El Museo Del Barrio, The Bronx Museum, The Fowler Museum in LA, the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and Fundacion Canal in Madrid, Spain, and the Coral Gables Art Museum in Miami.
Katarina has received numerous grants and awards including the Cintas Fellowship for Cuban and Cuban-American artists and a Pollock-Krasner grant, as well as residencies at Skowhegan; Ucross Foundation; Ragdale Foundation, the Kunstlerhaus in Salzberg, Austria; and the Open Art Residency in Eretria, Greece. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including the Scottsdale Museum of Art and the Frost Art Museum in Miami, FL.
Photo courtesy of Maria Lau
Katarina’s work experience cuts across nonprofit, academic, and for-profit organizations. Until 2014, she was also the Director of Community and Curatorial Engagement at Edelman, the largest global PR firm, where she started their corporate art collection and in-house art gallery, as well as developed and managed their community outreach programs. After Edelman, she when on to found MADE, an art consulting firm, then was the Program Manager of the Arts Administration graduate program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Katarina is currently the Associate Director of Fellowships at The OpEd Project, a social enterprise that works to raise underrepresented voices in the media. She was an Advisory Board member of NURTUREart, a Bushwick non-profit arts organization, and also a founding member of the +1+1 artist collective.
Katarina has an MFA from the University of Maryland, a Master of Theological Studies in Buddhism from the Harvard Divinity School, and a BA in Classics from St. John's College, Annapolis, MD. She has also studied creative writing at Gotham Writers Workshop and Chinese language at Middlebury College.