Joshua Heim

Class of 2001
Woodinville, Washington

Joshua Heim grew up in Kailua, Hawai‘i, and graduated from Lewis & Clark with a BA in Sociology and Anthropology in 2001. He came to Lewis & Clark as an actor looking to expand his horizons (Lewis & Clark did and still does have a great theatre program for a liberal arts college), and instead left an anthropologist and activist interested in the relationship between the arts and social change.

After graduation, Josh returned to Hawai‘i as an associate editor at Ka Ho‘oilina: Journal of Hawaiian Language Sources. The goals of the project were to preserve and digitize Hawaiian language legacy texts, and then publish these documents as a resource to educators in Hawaiian language immersion schools. He then moved to Seattle to develop exhibits at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, a museum that uses its exhibitions as a tool for community empowerment and social justice. YouthCAN, an arts-based youth development program he managed, was the recipient of the National Youth Arts and Humanities Program Award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

Now, Joshua resides in Woodinville, WA, with his partner Vivek, and is the arts program manager at the City of Bellevue. He serves on the King County 4Culture Arts Advisory Committee, is a board member of Cultural Access Washington, and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. Josh is also an alumni liaison for his other alma mater, the University of Washington Bothell, where he received an MA in Cultural Studies in 2010.

Photo credit:  Marc Studer