Cecily D. Cook

Program Officer for the Asian Cultural Council

Cecily D. Cook is Program Officer for the Asian Cultural Council, a small foundation which supports cultural exchange in the visual and performing arts between the countries of Asia and the United States. Ms. Cook received an M.A. degree in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989. Her thesis, The Montagnard-Dega Community of North Carolina, focused on the narrative history of a small group of refugees from the Central Highlands of Vietnam who had been resettled in North Carolina in 1986.

Upon completion of her degree, Ms. Cook was hired as Director of the Refuge Arts Group, a Boston, Massachusetts-based non-profit organization which supported traditional arts cultural conservation programs for the five primary Southeast Asian refugee communities in New England: Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Hmong, and Kmhmu. In 1992 she became the traditional arts consultant for the New England Foundation for the Arts, directing a traditional arts regional apprenticeship program for the five New England states and overseeing a technical support project to assist Southeast Asian and Caribbean performing artists.

From 1990 to 1995 Ms. Cook was a consultant on the Cambodian Artists Project, a partnership of the Cambodian dancers and musicians in the United States and Cambodia, including organizations such as the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, and the Cambodian Network Council. With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Asian Cultural Council, the Cambodian Artists Project produced a series of dance residencies and community workshops for Cambodian traditional dancers and musicians and documented important older dancer repertory in the United States and Cambodia.

In 1994, Ms. Cook relocated to New York City to become the Program Officer at the Asian Cultural Council. In September of 1994 she was invited to be a guest curator at the Vermont Folklife Center for an exhibition on wedding traditions in Vietnamese and Laos communities, and from 1994 to 1998, she served as a member of the New York State Council for the Arts traditional arts panel. Ms. Cook is a member of the American Folklore Society and the American Anthropological Association, and she sits on the board of directors of the New York Folklore Society.