2025 Annual Convening Speakers

Clement Hanami is the Vice President of Exhibitions and Art Director at the Japanese American National Museum where he has worked for more than 33 years. He is responsible for creation of the museum's dynamic and audience focused exhibition calendar from content development, design, fabrication, and installation. He created Finding Family Stories, a multi-year Arts Partnership Program that worked with multiple ethnic specific institutions in LA immediately following the uprisings in 1992. He was the Program Director for the National Preservation of Democracy that opened in 2005, and included the exhibition, Fighting For Democracy: Who is the We, in We the People that traveled to ten states across the US. He was Main Curator for Transpacific Borderlands: the Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo. His most recent project is Contested Histories: Preserving and Sharing a Community Collection which is an exhibition of WWII arts and images that were rescued from a public auction and has since traveled to more than 17 locations in an attempt to recover the history from these lost and now recovered artifacts. Mr. Hanami has an MFA from UCLA and has a personal record of individual shows and public works that inform his museum practice.