Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sound, Radio, Social Practice, Research
Website: cynthia-le.com
cyn le (Cynthia PhươngAnh Lê) is an Oakland-based artist, radio host, and cultural organizer whose practice weaves together sound, food, ritual, and community archiving. Working at the intersection of cultural memory and collective care, she draws on diasporic foodways, sonic research, and participatory gatherings to explore how Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American communities remember, grieve, and imagine possibility together. Her work is rooted in the Bay Area’s Southeast Asian diasporic cultural infrastructure, with ties to Oakland, Berkeley, and East San Jose.
Her research interests encompass collective listening practices, healing lineages, migration narratives, and the quiet politics of care work. Through radio broadcasts, live listening installations, shared meals, and small publications, she builds archives that resist formal institutions in favor of intimate, relational modes of transmission. She has been a resident at Headlands Center for the Arts (2024) and Bathers Library (Fall 2025).
Radio and sound serve as cyn le’s primary vehicle. Her monthly program Sea2Sea on Lower Grand Radio in Oakland combines archival research into psych-surf rock from 1960s–70s Southeast Asia with live conversation and music discovery, framing collective listening as a political act rooted in diasporic heritage. Meals, gatherings, and small-edition publications extend the work off the airwaves, creating spaces where cultural knowledge circulates through eating, talking, and being together.
Her collaborations with QTViệt Collective and Berkeley Community Acupuncture place healing and wellness within a framework of cultural infrastructure—insisting that care practices such as acupuncture clinics, ritual dinners, and participatory sound work are forms of art-making. The resulting practice is warm, durational, and community-directed, oriented toward the understated rather than the spectacular.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.