Ekalan Hou is a PhD student in the History of Art and American Studies programs at Yale, focusing on Asian American art and vernacular photography. Her research interests include transnational migration and labor history, comparative colonialisms, and performance and performativity of race. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Burlington Magazine, Trans Asia Photography, and catalogue essays for Stephanie Syjuco and Hostile Terrain 94.

A student of the Black Arts Movement School Modality, she is invested in Afro-Asian solidarity in art movements and political coalitions.