Telling Chinatown's Stories, Together

Each participant’s conversations then become the foundation for student-led creative projects—such as zines, collages, photography, poetry, or other multimedia works—to be preserved in a digital archive. Dyal’s background in media arts, filmmaking, and more has been essential in helping students see how creative expression can inform cultural inquiry, identity formation, and community research.

“When you're part of a diaspora, parts of your history can get lost over time," says Dyal, who is also the founder and director of a nonprofit media arts education lab. “Media becomes a great vehicle for helping young people piece those stories back together.”

Rather than teaching students how to create polished social media content, Dyal encourages them to think like researchers who use visual storytelling to investigate questions about family, memory, and belonging. Those skills, she believes, will remain valuable no matter what careers students eventually pursue.

“I want young people to leverage media to become researchers and investigators,” says Dyal. “The creative skills they're developing here are transferable to whatever pathway they choose.”

Researchers from ROOTS, which is currently a pilot program, hope this collaboration marks the beginning of a lasting partnership between Steinhardt and New York Chinese School. By empowering young people to document their families' histories while imagining Chinatown's future, the project is creating something that extends well beyond a single summer: a living archive of community memory and a new generation of storytellers prepared to carry it forward.