Alumnus’s show celebrates Auntie Sewing Squad’s work to ease effects of COVID-19
Kristina Wong is an alumnus of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA Arts. Created in 2020, her one-woman play “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” reflects Wong’s experience throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Kristina Wong is sewing change into the world.
The alumnus wrote and acted in “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” the solo show for which she is the first Asian American woman to be named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Inspired by Wong’s own experiences, the premise of the play is centered on a real-life organization created by Wong named the Auntie Sewing Squad, which focuses on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with sewing machines. Wong said the group concentrates their efforts on making masks for communities that have limited access to health care.
“It (the show) is a story of what my pandemic was like running a shadow FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency),” Wong said. “As we began to look at the communities that were still needing masks, they tended to all be communities of color that were hit adversely by structural violence and systemic racism and were the ones disproportionately getting hit the worst by the virus.”
After her previous show “Kristina Wong for Public Office” was postponed in 2020, Wong said she began to use her resources and offer homemade masks to those who were in need, including the immunocompromised and frontline workers. In March 2020, Wong said she expanded upon this idea and created the Auntie Sewing Squad, a Facebook group made entirely of volunteers willing to craft and distribute masks. During the time of the organization’s run, the community spanned 33 states with more than 800 volunteers and 250,000 masks made, she said." — Billie Chang, May 25, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
Read more about Kristina Wong.
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