⭑ Portfolio ⭑
my Smith-Corona typewriter, shot on digital
I write in academic and creative mediums, seen here. I also occasionally take photos on digital and 35 mm film, seen here.
Find my CV here.
current projects
explores the makings of the Filipino American diaspora across urban and colonial landscapes in early-20th century Chicago and the Philippines. Through a micro-historical methodology analyzing paper ephemera and archival film from community and institutional sociological archives, this paper adds greater nuance to often-overlooked history of Filipino American emergence in the Midwest during the American colonial period of the Philippines (1898-1946). I argued that Filipino Chicagoan diasporic subjects, neither elite paragons nor marginalized pioneers, navigated an acutely liminized colonial and racial subjecthood by cultivating images of settler prosperity to locate their belonging in the racially stratified climate of 1920s-1930s Chicago and the Midwest.
America is in the Heart-land
selected WORK
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Curator. Chicago in Quotas and Communities: Migration and Movement, 1935 & 1965. Mana Contemporary, Studio 316, October 2025.
Our opening exhibition, bringing together local leaders, advocates, and artists, was covered in Chicago’s PBS Station by Eunice Alpasan.
Collaborator. Univer/city: Where are You and Why? Mandel Hall, May 2025.
Student Introducer. Literary Arts Lab: Internal Ecologies with Jericho Brown, Sigrid Nunez, and Kerri Howley, The Program in Creative Writing, April 2025.
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Villazor, Reese Carolina Cuison and Cuison-Villazor, Rose. “Anti-Asian Immigration Policies.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies, eds. Kevin Nadal, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, E.J.R. David (Sage Encyclopedia, 2022).
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eight gigabytes of random memory. Memoryhouse Magazine, Spring 2024.
ilong. Blacklight Magazine, May 2024.
Howth Cliff Walk, Dublin, Ireland on 35 mm film, shot on Olympus Trip 35 by me
Awards & Recognitions
RDI Department BA Thesis 2025 Prize
“Reese Villazor’sthesis, “America is in the Heart-land:” U.S. Empire and the Makings of the Filipino American Diaspora in Early 20th-Century Chicago,” is a deeply researched account of early Filipino life in Chicago, which explores the intersections between settler colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and Indigenous dispossession. Tracing shifts in attitudes, experiences, and legal status from the 1890s to the 1950s, as well as the role of education as a tool of colonial empire, the essay resists homogenizing the experiences of Filipino Americans, granting us glimpses into a rich range of diasporic lives.”
— Selection Committee, anonymous
margaret c annan memorial 2024 award
“This essay is formally daring, emotionally nuanced, chasing a grief that defies language with drawings, screenshots, strike throughs, subheadings--all manner of evidence and fragment, trying over and over to grasp something shattered.”
— Kendra Greene, judge
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