About Me
What nourishes me.
My approach to community engagement is rooted in the lessons I learned from my grandmother’s patio in South Korea, nestled among winding alleyways where neighbors showed up for each other with food and support.
This sense of generosity and connection inspires my work, where I seek to create spaces that honor cultural traditions, embrace differences, and foster shared meaning-making.
I support collaborations with artists, planners, nonprofits, as well as municipal, state, and national partners. In that work, I’ve co-created capacity-building tools, facilitated community capital mapping workshops, and reimagined cultural ecosystems.
Images: Collage of Mina’s grandmother’s neighborhood across various decades.
Every place and person holds a powerful story.
These layers are essential in understanding your historical and present context, building strategies for your communities’ future, and evolving in directions previously unimagined.
Grounded in active listening, mixed-methods research, curiosity, and care, I invite complexity and depth into our shared work to build community-based processes.
Images: Buildings downtown and the Connecticut River oxbow in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Supporting communities engage with complexity.
I’ve partnered with organizations such as Filmbuilding Malden, City of Malden, Greater Malden Asian American Community Coalition, New England Foundation for the Arts, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and the National Endowment for the Arts to support investments in arts, culture, and community development.
Previously, as Program Officer of the Community Initiative at the Mass Cultural Council, I developed resources on multisector arts and culture funding, asset-mapping, and community engagement strategies, helping to align investment with local needs and opportunities. I also spearheaded neighborhood and small business partnerships as Assistant Director at The Fenway Alliance, while managing various cultural programming, such as TEDxFenway, Opening Our Doors, and the Fenway Cultural District efforts.
Real change happens when you step into the unknown.
Images: Scenes from in and around Graffiti Alley in the Central Square Cultural District in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
My path has been shaped by a belief that real change happens by embracing uncertainty, learning from lived experiences, and adapting along the way.
I majored in History at Smith College and earned a Master’s in Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, driven by my passion for understanding how communities relate to one another and to a place.
From researching intergovernmental dynamics to studying the role of cultural districts in shaping community capital, I’ve explored how policies, histories, and community-driven initiatives intersect. My experience spans publishing, arts administration, and urban planning, with a particular focus on bridging disciplines to support community-led strategies. A Fulbright Fellowship deepened this approach, bringing me to Kazakhstan, where I gained insight into landscapes shaped by the evolving cultural identities and geopolitics across Central Asia.
Across all my work, I am committed to fostering connections between people, place, and imagination—supporting communities through complexity, towards more just futures.