BOARD
Bonny Wong
Nomination Committee Chair, International Women’s Forum HK, Council Member of Haw Par Music Foundation, IMC and SSB Manager of Wong Shiu Chi Secondary School
Bonny was Head of Charities of Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and Secretary of the Board and Director of CEO’s Office of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority.
Jessica Cheng
Assistant General Manager, Lui Che Woo Prize
Jessica is Assistant General Manager at Lui Che Woo Prize for World Civilisation, an international award that recognises outstanding achievements and contribution in support of environmental sustainability, human welfare and positive energy.
Edmond Cheuk
Director, Cedar Education Group
Edmond Cheuk is the Director of the Cedar Education Group, a leading early childhood education service and solutions provider in Hong Kong.
Jo Lusby
Co-chair
CEO of Pixie B, an independent creative and media agency
Jo Lusby is the former North Asia Managing Director of Penguin Random House. A high-profile member of the regional business community, Jo is a non-executive director of the China-Britain Business Council, PEN Hong Kong and works as a guest lecturer at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Innovation Centre. She also works with managers in multinational and international companies offering leadership development. A fluent Mandarin speaker, Jo has lived in Asia since 1995.
Shalini Mahtani
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, The Zubin Foundation
Shalini Mahtani is one of Hong Kong’s most authoritative and respected voices on social issues, particularly diversity and inclusion. In addition to founding The Zubin Foundation, among the city’s most accomplished think tanks on issues related to ethnic minority welfare and patient welfare, Shalini is the founder of Community Business, the first organisation in Asia that brings together companies and their management around women, LGBT and disabilities at work. Shalini sits on the Commission for Children in Hong Kong and is the Convenor for the Working Group for Children with Specific Needs.
John Carroll
Principal Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong
Prof. John Carroll is Principal Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong, where he directs the MA programme in Hong Kong history and teaches undergraduate courses on Hong Kong history, British imperial history, and the history of museums and tourism. Raised in Florida, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Carroll is the author of five books, including Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong (2005), A Concise History of Hong Kong (2007), and The Hong Kong-China Nexus (2022).
Catherine McClelland
President and Managing Director at Sutton Communications.
Catherine McClelland is a cultural communications professional with more than a decade’s experience directing strategic campaigns for the world’s leading arts organisations. She has specialist expertise in international news campaigns, long-term strategic brand building, launching major capital projects including new museums, and working across Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
Angela Wong
General Manager of Corporate Communications & Administration, Jebsen Group
Angela Wong is the General Manager of Corporate Communications & Administration at Jebsen Group. She is a board member of the Zonta Club of HK II, as well as one of the founders of Strive Gold Team, a project to help elite local girl’s basketball players to utilize the sport to get into university.
Bonny Wong
Co-chair
Member of the Board of International Women’s Forum HK, Council member of Haw Par Music Foundation
Bonny studied music in college and later qualified to practise law in England and Wales and Hong Kong. She was Head of Charities of Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and Secretary of the Board and Director of CEO’s Office of the West Kowloon Cultural District project. After her departure from West Kowloon in mid-2016, she has devoted her time to community service.
ADVISORS
Ravi Mattu
Deputy Asia Editor, the Financial Times
Ravi Mattu is the deputy Asia news editor of the Financial Times. Since joining the FT in 2000, he has held a number of senior positions at the FT including: Tech Editor; Business Life editor, overseeing the management section of the paper; Acting Editor of the FT Weekend Magazine; and editor of Special Reports (magazines and websites). He joined the FT from Prospect Magazine, where he was a senior editor. He began his career at Harper’s Magazine in New York.
Charmaine Chan
Author and South China Morning Post Design Editor
Charmaine Chan started her journalism career in Sydney and has since worked at newspapers and magazines in Tokyo and Hong Kong. She is the South China Morning Post’s Design Editor, author of Courtyard Living: Contemporary Houses of the Asia-Pacific (Thames & Hudson) and a former Deputy Editor at the Asia Literary Review. Charmaine has degrees in Journalism and Japanese Studies, and is a triple winner at the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong’s Press Awards.
Joanna Lee
Founder, Museworks Limited
Joanna C. Lee is the founder of Museworks Limited, an international arts consultancy that has developed Asian media strategies for western symphony orchestras and helped facilitate large-scale arts festivals for New York’s Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw and the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. She was a consulting producer for Dream of the Red Chamber for San Francisco Opera and a cultural advisor for David Henry Hwang’s bilingual Broadway comedy Chinglish and Kung Fu, a musical based on the life of Bruce Lee. As translator, she has developed surtitles for the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre and numerous numerous films. A public host and interpreter for the Hong Kong International Film Festival since 2004, she is the co-founder of Museworks Books, publisher of the Pocket Chinese Classics series and the annual Pocket Chinese Almanac.
Shonee Mirchandani,
Owner-operator, Bookazine
Shonee M Mirchandani is the owner-operator of Bookazine, Hong Kong’s largest bookshop chain. Prior to joining the family business Shonee graduated from law school and has a MBA from Durham University. She has worked at Amnesty International, Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett, White and Case and in legal and compliance for Credit Suisse. Shonee has been instrumental in championing the local writing scene and responsible for rebranding and growing the family business into one of Hong Kong’s leading retailers.
Jennie Orchard
Jennie Orchard is an experienced editor and publisher, with strong links to the non-profit world and to women’s organisations. She was formerly the inaugural Development Director for Room to Read Australasia, raising millions of dollars to fund literacy initiatives and promote gender equality through education for children in ten developing countries in Asia and Africa. She currently divides her time between Sydney and Hong Kong and continues to be involved in a range of non-profit commitments.
James Shea
Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University
James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye. Star in the Eye was selected for the Fence Modern Poets Series and included in the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets series. His poems have appeared in various anthologies including The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. A former Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong, he is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Ken Smith
Journalist and Author
Ken Smith has covered music and culture on five continents for a wide range of media. He currently divides his time between New York and Hong Kong, where he serves as the Asian performing arts critic for the Financial Times. A winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing, he is the author of Fate! Luck! Chance! Amy Tan, Stewart Wallace and the Making of “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” Opera. A regular arts commentator for RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”, he has also served as an English-language editor for the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Two collections of his writings about music have been translated and published by Beijing Normal University Press. He is the co-founder of Museworks Books, publisher of the Pocket Chinese Classics series and the annual Pocket Chinese Almanac.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Author and Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California, Irvine
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author of five books, including China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know and Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo. He has edited or co-edited several other books, including The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China. He is a frequent contributor to newspapers (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc.), magazines (e.g., TIME ), and literary reviews (Times Literary Supplement, Asian Review of Books, and Los Angeles Review of Books, for which he serves as an advising editor). He is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California at Irvine, where he also serves as Historical Writing Mentor for the Literary Journalism Program and holds a courtesy appointment in the Law School.
Kate Whitehead
Freelance Journalist
Kate Whitehead holds a BA in Literature (Warwick University) and a Masters in Literature (Sussex University). The author of two Hong Kong crime books – After Suzie and Hong Kong Murders – she was on staff at the Hong Kong Standard and the South China Morning Post and then as editor of Cathay Pacific’s inflight magazine Discovery. She is now a freelance journalist and over the last three years has written for many international media outlets, including Acumen, BBC Travel, CNN, Forbes, Publishing Perspectives, Time, Travel & Leisure and Women’s Wear Daily. She also writes for local publications, chiefly the SCMP.
Xu Xi
Writer
XU XI 許素細 is Indonesian-Chinese, born and raised in Hong Kong. An author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction, she is also editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Forthcoming titles include a new collection, Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations (Signal 8, 2023) and The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, October 2021), co-authored with Robin Hemley. She is co-founder of Authors at Large and holds the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. A diehard transnational, she now split her life between the state of New York and the rest of the world. Follow her @xuxiwriter at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.