Jaclyn Reyes

Jaclyn Reyes

ABOUT STATEMENT PRESS

Jaclyn Reyes (b. Los Angeles, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, cultural organizer, and PhD candidate in Social Welfare at The City University of New York Graduate Center. Based in New York City and working transnationally between the U.S. and the Philippines, her work combines visual art, research, public programming, and community partnerships to examine how migrants, diaspora organizations, and institutions collectively sustain transnational infrastructures of care and welfare across dispersed geographies. Her interdisciplinary background spans design, education, arts administration, and participatory research, informing projects that connect creative practice with social welfare, public memory, and community-based knowledge production.

Much of her community-engaged work has developed through Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts, where she co-develops cultural organizing projects with Filipino diasporic communities in Queens and beyond. This work includes curating exhibitions, producing public art installations, organizing creative campaigns, and leading initiatives such as Meal to Heal: Mutual Aid Initiative; the Little Manila Avenue street co-naming;The Tandang Sora Project, a public memory project honoring Filipina care labor; and the UKAI Initiative (Unearthing Knowledge, Arts, and Interdependence), an environmental justice-centered project focused on material culture, migration, and ecological responsibility.

Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum, and Flushing Town Hall in New York City, and at Ateneo Art Gallery in Manila, Alfredo F. Tadiar Library in La Union, Ang Panublion Museum in Roxas City, Capiz, and the Meranaw Cultural Heritage Center in Marawi, Mindanao in the Philippines.

Reyes has worked across humanitarian, policy, communications, publishing, education, and arts contexts, with organizations including the International Rescue Committee, the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, BerlinRosen, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Condé Nast, and Visionaire. She has also worked as a teaching artist in New York City, Malaysia, the Philippines, Guatemala, and Cambodia.

In Spring 2025, Reyes taught “Human Rights and Social Policy” at the CUNY Silberman School of Social Work as an adjunct lecturer. She also recently served as a research assistant for the forthcoming New York State AANHPI Report, supporting research and editorial work for a statewide report on AANHPI communities. She has held fellowships with the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium, Social Practice CUNY, the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, the CUNY Center for the Humanities, and the CUNY Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies (BRES) Program. She was a Fulbright U.S. Student Scholar in Malaysia in 2014.

She has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Laundromat Project, The Monument Lab, the Asian Women Giving Circle, En Foco, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her writing appears in The Monument Lab’s Re:Generation, a publication on public memory, monuments, and community-based practice, and her work has been featured by The New York Times, Artforum, Gothamist, ARTnews, Public Radio International, amongst others.

Jaclyn studied Studio Art at California State University Long Beach before transferring to Syracuse University where she received her BFA in Art Photography. In 2019, she earned her Ed.M. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

You can email her at hi [at] jgrey.es