Korean American Story was created in 2010 to capture, create, preserve, and share stories of the Korean American experience. We believe storytelling can uplift our community and bring us together. By sharing personal stories and family histories, we can connect hearts and minds through our shared humanity.
On Friday, October 17, 2025, we gathered to celebrate the 15th Annual Korean American Story Gala — an unforgettable evening honoring the voices and achievements that continue to shape our community.
We were thrilled to celebrate the 14th Annual Gala on Friday, October 25th. Your generous support helped us raise a record-breaking $600K! This incredible achievement will allow us to continue our mission of preserving our heritage and inspiring future generations.
Reliving the magic of our 13th Annual Gala! We want to thank you all for your unwavering support and for making this night one for the books. We exceeded our donation goal in less than 15 minutes!! Truly a record time!! We couldn’t have done it without our amazing community. Cheers to an incredible evening!
Celebrating our 12th Annual Gala in-person at Tribeca 360, NYC! We want to thank our honorees, Linda Lee, Sesame Street, and Esther Choi for being so vulnerable and sharing their Korean American story with us. You all deserve to be called trailblazers for your impact and contributions to our community!
It’s been two years since our last in-person gala and want to give a special thank you to all who came to support us and celebrate our community. We thank our honorees, TOKiMONSTA, Eugene Lee Yang, and Juju Chang for being so vulnerable and sharing their Korean American story with us.
We thank and celebrate our honorees – Andy Kim, Kristen Kish, and Kyung B. Yoon – who shared their wonderful stories. A big thank you to our fantastic NYC Story Slam 2019 winners, Jen Kim and Claire Choi, our musical performer Year of the Ox, and our fabulous host Vivian Lee. We hope many of you can join us next year for our special 10th Anniversary!
We thank and celebrate our honorees – Andy Kim, Kristen Kish, and Kyung B. Yoon – who shared their wonderful stories. A big thank you to our fantastic NYC Story Slam 2019 winners, Jen Kim and Claire Choi, our musical performer Year of the Ox, and our fabulous host Vivian Lee. We hope many of you can join us next year for our special 10th Anniversary!
We thank our honorees, Tereza Lee, Joon H. Kim and Diana Son, who shared their wonderful stories. We give our heartfelt thanks to the Story Slam performers, Anthony Luckett and David Choi, who moved us to laugh and cry.
Special thanks to our honorees Martha Crawford, Jeannie Park, and Brian Tee for sharing their truly inspiring personal stories and to the incredible beatboxer and live-looper, Sung Lee, who amazed the audience.
We celebrated Trailblazer Honorees: Randall Park, Hooni Kim, and Aiyoung Choi and also featured rappers Awkwafina and John & Rick Lee. Due to a scheduling conflict, Randall Park was not able to receive his award in person. The story he shared via video will not be published in order to respect the actor’s wishes for it to remain private.
For our 2015 Annual Gala, we honored the Korean American Trailblazers Sandra Oh, Jonathan “Dumbfoundead” Park, Thomas Park Clement, and our Diamond Supporter honoree, Marja Vongerichten. The event took place at the lovely Tribeca Rooftop and was hosted by the talented and lovely Vivian Lee. Dan Phai was our auctioneer who was kind enough to fly out from Los Angeles to help us out!
2014 Annual Benefit. Each year we feature interesting Korean Americans who share their stories live, without script. It is as much about the art of storytelling as it is about the content of their stories. This year, Dr. Agnes Rhee Ahn and Lt. Dan Choi hit the ball out of the park. Their storytelling captivated us and their stories challenged and inspired us to act to be the agents of change in our world. As you can see from these photos, it was a fun and inspiring evening.
KoreanAmericanStory.org’s Third Annual Benefit “Live Storytelling”, took place on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at the Central Park Boathouse. Our special Storytellers Eugenia Kim and Milton Washington, wowed the audience with their captivating storytelling performances. The evening was filled with inspirational and emotional stories and the power of authentic narrative was evident.
KoreanAmericanStory.org’s second Annual Benefit “A Celebration of Multi-Cultural Korean Americans”, took place on May 8th, 2012 at the French Culinary Institute.
KoreanAmericanStory.org held its inaugural fundraiser which was a Benefit Recital with David Kim, the Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, on June 4, 2011. We had a diverse group of attendees who witnessed an amazing performance by David Kim accompanied by Gail Niwa on the piano. David played 5 musical pieces, and in between each piece, he paused to share his story in a genuine and authentic manner that captivated the audience and moved them to laughter and tears simultaneously. As one attendee commented it was a “once-in-a-lifetime experience”.
