Scholarship Winners
Our scholarships were awarded in the categories of Advocacy, the Arts and STEM. DAY Prism's scholarships were divided into these three distinct categories to uplift Queer Asians in underrepresented fields. Each recipient was awarded $1,000 to support them in their education and work.
Advocacy
Celine Qin (she/they)
Celine Qin (@dreamych3line) is a writer, community organizer, and government-appointed representative for youth issues & public policy based in Sacramento, California. As a Chinese-American daughter navigating today’s systems, Celine explores the meaning of feminism, girlhood, & inter-generational healing through her powerful poetry. Visit celineqin.com for more info!
Celine is the Founder & Lead Director of The Reclamation Project @ 916 (@trp_916), a grassroots social justice organization delivering community care, liberating anti-oppression education, and solidarity to marginalized and working-class people & youth in the Sacramento area. She has had the honor of building a network of high school and college student activists, organizers, regional-wide social justice alliances, and volunteers across various cities. Working with both grassroots movements and local public policy, the redistribution of resources, transformative justice, and healing for young people of under-served areas acts as the forefront of Celine’s work.
Taban Malihi (she/her)
Taban Malihi (she/her/hers) is a junior from Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts who is interested in foreign policy, refugee and immigrant advocacy, healthcare and humanitarian aid, and human rights. As proudly queer Iranian and Muslim, she channels her personal experiences in her work, and finds inspiration in queer SWANA role models like Cyrus Veyssi. She is the founder of MESWANA (Middle East, South West Asia, North Africa) Coalition at her school, and in her free time, enjoys singing and learning languages like Farsi, French, and Arabic.
Taban's work focuses on supporting queer people of SWANA heritage in her community and promoting intersectional and antiracist dialogue in queer spaces. She aims to emphasize representation (through community presentations and an upcoming interview series for Pride month) and the importance of queer identities in social movements (like the Iran protest movements) worldwide in order to highlight a diverse range of queer SWANA experiences--joys and struggles. She has worked with school administration on a wide variety of issues, including ensuring more inclusive holidays and prayer spaces and leading anti-racism curriculum development (Courageous Conversations on Race, anti-Orientalism and Islamophobia).
Art
Chi Lu (she/they)
​Chi is a 17-year old Vietnamese immigrant whose home base is in Los Gatos, California. She enjoys listening to shoegaze music and reading works by Ocean Vuong and Richard Siken. In the future, she hopes to major in sociology and political science, as well as picking up crocheting as a hobby.
Miriam Shbaita (they/them)
Miriam Shbaita is a self-taught artist whose work is designed to be visceral in nature; to have an underlying theme of melancholy and understanding that comes with witnessing violence and experiencing silent grief from a very young age. They find themself in the liminal space of in-betweens; too much of one thing, too little of another, appropriate in one setting, inconsequential in others. Thriving in excess has led to using art as both a method of self-expression, and a way to build community.
STEM
Kai Huang (they/them, he/him, ze/zir)
Kai is a first-year medical student at UCSF School of Medicine where they serve as Advocacy Chair for the LGBTQ medical student organization, PrideMed, as well as a student member of the Anti-Oppressive Curriculum Initiative. After completing their medical training, Kai will serve their trans community as an openly queer, trans, and nonbinary Chinese American physician. In zir free time, ze loves photography, rock climbing, cooking, reading, and hanging out with zir friends.
In addition to his advocacy through PrideMed and the AOCI, Kai also coordinates the Transgender Health Elective at UCSF. They assist with research on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) terminology in Mandarin and how to talk about SOGI in healthcare settings. This summer, ze will expand upon this research to examine healthcare experiences of trans and nonbinary Chinese people and create recommendations for healthcare providers.
Amri Velayutham (he/him)
Amri is a 20-year-old A-levels student with a passion for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the geoscience and planetary science fields. He has experience creating accessible tutoring opportunities for students of diverse abilities and hopes to continue this work while studying earth sciences at Oxford University. Amri aspires to work in space exploration in the future, leveraging his passion for DEI to make a positive impact.
Amri is a passionate STEM student from Malaysia with a strong interest in earth sciences, particularly astrobiology. He has conducted research comparing theories for life's origin and completed field work documenting coral biodiversity in Mersing, Johor. Alongside his scientific pursuits, Amri has also demonstrated his commitment to addressing educational inequity by creating a peer tutoring initiative to provide extra coaching for students from underserved backgrounds, as well as having collaborated with larger welfare organizations.