meet

AMY 林安薇

Amy Grace Lam (she/they) is a Chinese Canadian-American multidisciplinary queer artist-healer creating immersive experiences for transformation and expansion. Amy explores how the spiritual, natural and physical worlds converge to bring renewed awareness and consciousness of life and our humanity. Her performances, installations and music have been presented at performance venues and radio, community spaces and universities, nature and sidewalks across the Bay Area with an intention to activate diverse spaces and audiences. 

Amy’s literary writing is featured in AsianWeek, Asian American Literary Review, Feministing.com, Marsh Hawk Review, Moyama Press, Pochino Press, Ricepaper and VONA. They are the recipient of the 2021 San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and Theater Bay Area’s 2019 Ca$h Grant Creates Award for their experimental augmented reality play Out of the Box. Amy supports Bay Area immigrant/refugee organizations through developing innovative community mental health models. 

A true multi-tasker, Amy loves taking long walks on the beach while having deep conversations on the phone and tracking her steps. Her record this far is 23,990 steps in one day~not on vacation. If Amy had all the money and time in the world, she would ski more, sing more, skate more, and of course, travel with her family around the world and eat more delicious foods. Amy currently resides with her family on the unceded ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, original inhabitants of San Francisco.

“Amy’s poems take me to the bluest sky in the darkness of the night.  In this dreamy place, the stars are shining like diamonds, glowing light on the earth,  allowing me to see the world from above with its minutest details.  I hear plants, animals, and people speaking in their mother tongues and miraculously understand their words and the essence of their pleas. 

When I am done reading any of her poems,  I realize something in my consciousness has changed and ask myself:   “How can I make this awareness last so that I can live the remainder of my life with vigilance, mindful activism, and genuine care?”

Mona Afary, Director

Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants

  • Amy’s music taps into an unseen energy that my visual art conveys. In our collaboration, she channeled my ancestors through her fingers to tell their story.

    Cynthia Tom, Visual Artist

  • This play is timely and shows how we are a bridge, finding ways to connect with our ancestors.

    Audience Member

  • Love It! So entertaining and deep! Can’t wait for it to be completed and fully produced.

    Audience Member

  • I enjoyed the play’s joyous exploration of using social media and internet to find a way to bridge the gap with our ancestors.

    Audience Member

  • Thank you for sharing this beautiful poem, Amy!! It gives new meaning to the idea of a mother tongue.

    Bianca Nepales, corporate DEI leader

  • What Amy and I are doing together through our art is time traveling through past-present-future. Healing ancestrally and for ourselves today.

    Cynthia Tom, Visual Artist

  • After reading the words out loud I once again came to tears by the end of the poem. The words, the feeling, the essence of this poem struck such a deep chord within me - it struck the "sacred bone of life", a Re-Memberance of who and what I am - who and what we all are.

    F.C., Performer

  • Amy’s poetry is intelligent, evocative and relatable. She invites us into a multilayered world in which languages, ancestors and beauty intersect to form story.

    Patricia, Educator/Artist

  • I want to know more about these ancestors!

    Audience Member

  • Her music weaved through the installations as people walked through the floating pillows and umbrellas.

    Cynthia Tom, Visual Artist

  • Amy’s words give voice to the experience of women of color as they navigate the challenge of living authentically and unapologetically who they are in the world.

    Patricia, Educator/Artist