Workshop

Dreaming of the Unicorn: A Memoir and Biography Workshop with Christina Cha

Thu, Sep 24, 2026

2:00 PM–4:00 PM

Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all CUNY Graduate Center students, faculty, and staff.

Christina Cha in You Are My Audience (2023), directed by Roc Morin. Film still.

How do we write a life from memory, from fragments, from silence, a child’s mythology. Christina Cha’s workshop “Dreaming of the Unicorn” invites participants to explore how memoir and biography can emerge through direct memory, inherited stories, objects, images, and what remains unknown.

This workshop grew from Ju Ly Ban’s Lost & Found archival journey through the work and life of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Her archival research developed into an ongoing friendship and collaboration with Christina, opening questions about how archives can create relationships and responsibilities in the present. Ju Ly will introduce Christina and frame the workshop in relation to this ongoing research, and will be joined by co-facilitator of the workshop and research scholar Alessandra Occhiolini.

Christina Cha will begin by reading from and discussing her forthcoming book manuscript, Dreaming of the Unicorn, a collection of lyrical essays about her relationship with her aunt, the artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Christina will reflect on what it means to write a family history that is both intimate and incomplete. A guided exercise will invite participants to begin from a detail that connects them to another life while attending to the limits of what they can know. Participants will have an opportunity to exchange reflections in small groups before returning to a larger conversation about the relationships and responsibilities created through writing.

No previous experience with memoir or biography is required. A short selection from Christina’s writing will be shared in advance with confirmed participants, who will be asked to read it before the workshop. Participants may choose what, if anything, they wish to share from their writing.

About the Workshop Leader and Facilitators

Christina Cha is a writer of creative nonfiction, poetry, and short fiction. Her work has been published in The Coachella Review, Pratik, and The Los Angeles Press. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2023 and was shortlisted for the 46th New Millennium Writing Award for Nonfiction. She is featured in and a consulting producer for You Are My Audience, a documentary in 10 self-portraits, which released in December, 2023. Her portrait is about her relationship to her aunt, the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She is currently working on her upcoming collection of personal essays, Dreaming of the Unicorn. Featured artist talks and readings include: The New School, The New York City Poetry Festival, AWP 2025 and 2026, Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin), and numerous festivals and book launches in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles, after many years in San Francisco.

Ju Ly Ban is a writer and researcher based in New York. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she brings Theresa Hak Kyung Cha into conversation with Black feminist thought to trace forms of queer kinship across archives, poetry, and translation. She is a Lost & Found Archival Research Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches composition at Baruch College. Her writing has recently appeared in Chicago Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and BOMB Magazine.

Alessandra Occhiolini is a visiting research scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a recent recipient of the New York Public Library’s Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship. Her work on disability, eugenics, and sexual violence in twentieth century media has appeared in CUSP: Late 19th/Early 20th Century Cultures, The Modernist Review, and The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics.

This event is hosted by Center for the Humanities and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and co-sponsored by the MA Program in Biography and Memoir (BAM) at the CUNY Graduate Center.