About me

I'm Ezra, a 2015 graduate of Harvard College, where I majored in Social Studies, an honors interdisciplinary major combining philosophy, political science and economics, and minored in Chinese. I wrote my senior thesis about institutional senior care in contemporary Beijing, which drew both on Confucian texts and interviews from my field research in Beijing during the summer of 2014.

I received the Trustman Fellowship from Harvard, which funds a year of purposeful travel after graduation. I spent a year in Peru, learning about the Chinese diaspora there. I studied Chinese brush painting and calligraphy with Joseph Yan and Janny Huang for fifteen years. Trained in China, Yan and Huang have co-run an art school in San Francisco since 1992. My teachers were the subjects of educator, Herbert Kohl's book, Painting Chinese, about artistic pedagogy. With this background, I participated in two artist residencies, one in the Andes, and another in the Amazon, to create Chinese style paintings of Peruvian life.

I am now the artist-in-residence at the Signet Society at Harvard for the 2017-2018 academic year. I am writing and illustrating a book about the Chinese diaspora and my time in Peru, building on the writing, paintings and sketches I worked on while I was there.

Other interests of mine include improv comedy, coxswaining, oral history and creative nonfiction. Born and raised in San Francisco, I love wearing a sweatshirt to the beach and biking up steep hills.