Kudos to Rick Shiomi, an award-winning Japanese Canadian playwright, director and the Artistic Director of Mu Performing Arts, for receiving the 2012 Ivey Award for Lifetime Achievement, at the 8th annual Ivey Awards, which were held at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, MN on Monday, September 24, 2012.

“This award is truly a recognition of the talented performers, writers and directors that have gathered at Mu. It’s only through many wonderful Mu productions such as Into The Woods, Little Shop of Horrors, Yellow Face,Asiamnesia and Flower Drum Song that a company such as Mu Performing Arts can have the impact warranting such recognition,” said Shiomi.

There are no set categories for the Iveys, the Twin Cities’ annual celebration which honors and showcases the work of professional theater companies and artists over the past year. The Lifetime Achievement Award for Shiomi and the Emerging Artist Award, which was presented to Isabel Nelson, a performer, director, and theatre creator, are the only predetermined...

Congratulations to Maurice Lim Miller, and An-My Le. Both have been selected as 2012 MacArthur Fellows which carries a $500,000 no-strings-attached support.

MacArthur Foundation announced today 23 new MacArthur Fellows for 2012. The recipients learned, through a phone call out of the blue from the Foundation, that they will each receive $500,000 in no-strings-attached support over the next five years.

One of the recipients is Oakland, California's Maurice Lim Miller, 66, a leader in the development of services and systems designed to break the cycle of economic dependency for low-income families across the United States.  

Frustrated by the frequent recidivism into poverty he witnessed during his two decades with Asian Neighborhood Design, an agency focused on tenant rights, job training, and youth development, Lim Miller founded the Family Independence Initiative (FII) in 2001 with the goal of helping low-income working families—who often struggle in isolated circumstances or without clear direction—build their own pathways to self-sufficiency. FII has evolved into a national model that taps into the initiative and capability of low-income households to maximize their own networks and resources and guide themselves out of poverty.

An-My Le, 52, from Annandale-on-Hudson, New York also received a phone call that she is a new 2012 MacArthur Fellow. She is a photographer approaching the subjects of war and landscape from ew perspectives to create images...

Manu Narayan is taking no prisoners as Richard Roma, the smooth talking, ruthless, sleazy, dishonest, immoral top salesman, in La Jolla Playhouse’s critically-acclaimed revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning lacerating play about a group of desperate salesmen in a Chicago real estate office, currently playing to packed houses in the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre through October 21, 2012.

Playhouse Artistic Director Christopher Ashley is at the helm of Glengarry Glen Ross, and has assembled a seasoned multi-cultural cast featuring Narayan, Peter Maloney (Broadway’s West Side Story, Six Degrees of Separation) as Shelly Levene, James Sutorius (Broadway’s The Farnsworth Invention) as Dave Moss, Ray Anthony Thomas (Broadway’sRace) as George Aaronow, Jeff Marlow (Colony Theatre’s Around the World in 80 Days) as James Lingk, Matt MacNelly (NY Fringe Festival’sFourteen Flights) as Baylen, and Johnny Wu (Playhouse’s Peter and the Starcatchers, Broadway’s Chinglish) as John Williamson, who are at the top of their game in the lyrical language of “Mametspeak.”

Set designer Todd Rosenthal, lighting designer David Lander and sound designer David Corsello set the scene for the depressing tone ofGlengarry Glen Ross, in the first act with the...

You Are Good Enough

By Marilyn Tam

They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them. 

 ~Mahatma Gandhi

            Are you good enough? Most people harbor feelings that somehow if people really knew who they are, they will not like them. This nagging feeling buzzes in the brain like small yet powerfully irritating mosquitoes, ready to sting at any moment, undermining our confidence to claim our rightful place at the table. This sense of insecurity can be negatively self-fulfilling and very destructive because it robs us of the confidence and courage to forge ahead on achieving our dreams. The choice to change is in our own hands.

            Being an unwanted child I was told from as early as I can recall that I was worthless, not a good start to building self-esteem. Yet eventually I learned to trust my inner knowing that each person is worthwhile just as they are. Self-respect gave me the strength and resilience to leave home in my mid teens and come to America, and to succeed in business, humanitarian work and in life.  How did that happen? I was blessed along the way with angels who told me that I was OK. We all have those angels in our lives when we look for them.

            My first angel was my grandfather who gave me my Chinese name, Hay Lit, the...

 October 8, 2012

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka - Photo by Chris Goodfellow Gladstone Institutes SF

 The world of medicine has taken a huge leap forward with the startling discoveries by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, 50, and British researcher Sir John Gurdon, 79.

Yamanaka and Gurdon are winners of the Nobel Prize for medicine announced today for their joint discoveries in stem cells.

As a post-doctorate scientist at Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, Yamanaka began what would become his life's work to unlock the code to creating stem cells.

By 2006, he succeeded in unlocking the code, furthering the research published in 1962 by Sir John Gurdon, who now works for the University of Cambridge.

The groundbreaking discoveries prove that it is possible to take genetic material from any cell in the body, such as skin cells, and tranplant and reprogram them into a stem cell to become any other cells in the body. 

Dr. Yamanaka, currently a professor at Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan still works and commutes monthly to San Francisco for Gladstone, which is affiliated with the health-sciences institution University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). 

Related stories:

Nobelprize.org

Nobel medicine prize goes to SF scientist by Erin Allday, San Francisco Chronicle

British, Japanese scientists share Nobel Prize for stem cell work by Eryn Brown and Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times