Josephine Forman Scholarship: Cheeyeon Park

Cheeyeon Park, who is pursuing an MLIS degree at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a graduate concentration in Asian American Studies, is the 2026 recipient of the Josephine Forman Scholarship, sponsored by the General Commission on Archives and history of the United Methodist Church in cooperation with the Society of American Archivists (SAA). This $10,000 scholarship provides financial support to students of color pursuing graduate education in archival science, encourages students to pursue careers as archivists, and promotes the diversification of the American archives profession.

Park graduated with a BA in visual arts from Columbia University. Before pursuing her MLIS, she worked as a book buyer for a contemporary art bookstore affiliated with a global art book distribution company in New York City and later in bilingual art publishing in Seoul. Through these experiences, she became aware of the transnational inequities shaping the global circulation of information, particularly the ways Euro-American publishing infrastructures influence which histories, languages, and narratives achieve visibility across borders. Park recognized that such imbalances shaping the circulation of information also extend into archives. Diasporic communities often remain under-documented or absent from dominant historical records. Her master’s thesis focuses on one such archival silence: She is conducting an institutional ethnography of the Korean American Catholic communities in Southern California.

Beyond her research, Park serves as the programming chair for the UCLA student chapter of SAA and volunteers on the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s Foundations and Futures multimedia textbook project, which supports digital archival initiatives focused on expanding access to Asian American histories. Starting in September 2026, she will begin her internship as the UCLA Community Archives Lab Mellon Intern at Visual Communications Archives, one of the largest photographic and moving image archives on Asian Pacific experiences in America.

Park hopes to work as an archivist specializing in the documentation of underrepresented diasporic communities. One of her research advisors described her as an “outstanding” student, adding, “Her commitment to advancing the archives profession through practice and research promises to generate relevant resources for both academic and community stakeholders.”