Teen Ambassadors
The USC PAM Teen Ambassadors program brings enthusiastic, creative, and culturally-minded high school students together to learn about Asian art, museum careers, and public program planning.
Through bi-monthly after school meetings, students work with education staff to plan and execute special, teen-only events and social media content filled with activities of their choosing.
This is a volunteer position with opportunities to participate in and engage with the museum’s many education and public programs. Meetings and events are held in-person. For the 2025-26 academic year, the program will run from January through the end of April.
Applications for the 2025-26 cohort will be available in late Fall 2025. Please check back soon and follow us on social media for updates.
For questions or more information, please contact Valentina Quezada, Education and Engagement Manager, at vquezada@usc.edu
Previous Teen Ambassador Projects
2023
This digital zine is the culminating project of the USC PAM Teen Ambassadors 2023 cohort.
To spark personal stories and new ways for USC PAM’s Teen Ambassadors to engage in the museum’s permanent collection, the creative collective Narrated Objects led them in a series of exploratory, sensory-themed writing workshops. Together we focused on the process of looking at, thinking about, and making art—with the goal to reimagine our interactions with art objects.
These are a few of the questions we posed:
- What do you see, smell, hear, and feel in the museum?
- What artwork attracts you and why?
- What is one question you’d like to ask the object?
Each ambassador selected an object from the permanent collection to discuss, and then used the same observational skills and creative instincts from the workshop at home. During the next workshop, the ambassadors chose a personal object to share with their peers, what it meant to them, and investigated the possible connections between their home object and the museum piece. These pages share the ambassadors’ varied reflections on both, including what they learned and created in the process.
2021
Here at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, we believe that food has the ability to heal communities, bring joy, and create connections between people of all ethnic backgrounds. As part of their projects for Mental Health Month and AAPI Heritage Month, the 2021 cohort of USC PAM Teen Ambassadors have created a cookbook of their favorite comfort foods. Check it out below!
