Barry Till

Barry Till is a Curator Emeritus of Asian art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in Canada. With a wide-ranging knowledge of Asia's history, archaeology, and cultures, Barry has travelled extensively and lectured on numerous expeditions—including trips to China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar—for more than thirty years. He has published more than 100 exhibition catalogues (including The Buddhist Arts of Asia), books, and articles on various Asian art topics, and is an enthusiastic and engaging speaker. In 2008, Barry received the Distinguished Service Award from the Canadian Museums Association. He speaks Chinese, holds degrees in Far Eastern Studies, and studied at Oxford and at Nanjing University in China.

James Anderson

James Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A historian of premodern China and Vietnam, Anderson’s first book was The Rebel Den of Nung Tri Cao: Loyalty and Identity Along the Sino-Vietnamese Frontier (University of Washington Press, 2007).  He is co-editor with Nola Cooke and Li Tana of The Tongking Gulf Through History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and co-editor with John Whitmore of China's Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia (Leiden: Brill, 2014, forthcoming).  His recent articles include “Distinguishing between China and Vietnam: three relational equilibriums in Sino-Vietnamese Relations” in Journal of East Asian Studies (2013).  Professor Anderson served as Executive Director of the academic consortium Southern Atlantic States Association for Asian and African Studies (SASASAAS) from 2007 to 2010. He has been active for many years in promoting international education and study abroad opportunities at his home university in North Carolina.   

Dana Sachs

Dana Sachs first traveled to Vietnam in 1990 and she has been visiting the country and writing about it ever since. Her first book, The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam, chronicles her experiences living in Hanoi in the 1990s. Her novel If You Lived Here tells the story of the friendship between two women, one a Vietnamese exile in the United States and the other a North Carolina native, who travel together to Vietnam. In 2010, she published The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam, the result of a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship that allowed her to conduct extensive research in Vietnam. Dana’s love of literature and Vietnamese culture led her to translate, with Vietnamese partners, many Vietnamese short stories and to co-edit Crossing the River, a collection of short fiction by the acclaimed writer Nguyen Huy Thiep. With Nguyen Nguyet Cam and Bui Hoai Mai, she compiled a collection of Vietnamese folktales, Two Cakes Fit for a King, which includes beautifully illustrated versions of some of the country’s most beloved stories. Dana and her sister, documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs, also produced Which Way is East, a documentary film about contemporary Vietnam. Her journalistic articles and essays on Vietnam have appeared in numerous places, including National Geographic, The International Herald Tribune, Travel and Leisure Family and the Huffington Post. She lives with her family in North Carolina.

Bryce Beemer

Bryce Beemer has lived, worked, and researched in Southeast Asia for more than seven years, primarily in Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. His first visit to Thailand was as an exchange student in 1990, and he travelled to Burma only a few years later. Bryce received his PhD in Southeast Asian and World History from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His research is on cultural exchange with a focus on art, religious practices, dance, theater, and music; and on pre-colonial warfare and slavery. He has published numerous articles on the topic of slavery and cultural exchange and received several awards for original and innovative research.

Bryce has a deep passion for the Southeast Asian arts, artisans, and performers and has incorporated interviews and art historical analysis into his work. He enjoys sharing this passion for Southeast Asian culture and history with others and has delivered lectures on these topics to audiences in the U.S., Thailand, Burma, and India.