Julian Saporiti

Julian Saporiti is a musician and scholar, born and raised in Nashville, TN to an Italian American musician and a Vietnamese painter. In his 20s, he toured North America and Europe with an indie rock band called The Young Republic. After feeling burnt out from the road, he chose a quieter life as a scholar, investigating hidden American histories in the mountains of Wyoming. He then moved to Brown University to continue his research on race, refugees, music, memory and immigration. He has advanced degrees in American Studies and Ethnomusicology as well as a degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Boston.

In late 2016, Saporiti went back to Nashville and was sitting in his mother's kitchen listening to the dozens of oral histories he recorded of people who lived through WWII Japanese internment. With his headphones on and these stories in his ears, he picked up his guitar and began writing songs. "Music was the way I needed to tell this story," he reflects. "I also looked to my own Vietnamese War torn history and other stories of Asian-American experience." He now has a 70 song collection which combines historical documents, oral histories, archival sound, photography and film, and processes them through songwriting, film editing/projections and audio production. He will be adding to these collecting more material from Minidoka and Ontario during his residency.