Patricia Tumang will write about the lives and work of contemporary Filipino female artists—women who are underrepresented in mainstream media in the Philippines and internationally—and their contributions to national artistic discourse and post-colonial identity. She aims to expand her current scope of research beyond the metropolitan Manila area to write about Filipina women in the archipelago that live or work outside of the national region in cities like Cebu, Batanes, and Davao City, and who utilize non-traditional materials. As the Philippine nation continues to grapple with its own identity after Spanish, Japanese, and American colonization, the work of contemporary Filipino artists often arises from a desire to define or distill the essence of what it means to be Filipino. Tumang will examine how Filipino female artists negotiate these tensions of identity—whether personal or political—that arise in private and public spaces, and how this is expressed in their artwork and their lives.

Patricia Tumang is a writer and editor whose work focuses on the contemporary art scene in the Philippines. Since relocating to Manila in 2009 on a Fulbright fellowship, she has regularly published articles, reviews, and catalogue essays on the Philippines’s foremost artists, museums, and art events. She is a former managing editor of Contemporary Art Philippines, the country’s premier arts magazine, and a former editor at Hyphen, a magazine that covers art, culture, and politics in the Asian American community. Before moving to Manila, she resided in Oakland, California, where she earned an MFA in English and creative writing from Mills College in 2006, and received a Hedgebrook Residency for Women Authoring Change in 2007.