Growing up as the child of Filipino immigrants in California, Christine Bacareza Balance, Performing and Media Arts, had no idea that the world of performing arts held a place for someone like her. “And then in my sophomore year in high school, the musical Miss Saigon premiered on Broadway,” she remembers. “The original production starred [Filipino actress and singer] Lea Salonga. For the first time, I saw someone who was both a Filipino and a performer. That had a big impact on me.”

Balance’s burgeoning interest in the arts received another boost in college when she discovered Filipino American writer Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters, which explores the social, political, and cultural issues of Manila in the 1950s and 1980s. Around the same time, Balance joined a band, singing and playing the accordion, and volunteered at Bindlestiff Studio, a community-based Filipino American theater in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“A lot of what we did at Bindlestiff focused on identity,” she says. “And we also looked at the history of the relationship between the United States and the Philippines, and the culture shaped by it. We explored how that allowed for the migration of Filipinos like our parents, and how it had shaped a type of artistic sensibility for artists in the Philippines, as well as in the U.S.”

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Science website.