Celebrate Asian Heritage at New Haven Museum
Join the New Haven Museum for a special Asian Heritage event highlighting some of the joyous celebrations brought to the Elm City from across Asia on Sunday, November 9, 2025, from 3 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The free event offers programing for all ages, featuring art, music, literature, and dance. Register here.
“As our world becomes more globalized, it is important for its citizens to appreciate cultural differences while celebrating our similarities,” says Lely Evans of the New Haven Chinese Cultural Cooperative, one of the event’s organizers. Evans notes that autumn brings out a lot of universal similarities—family, nostalgia, and love—shared by cultures that are far apart, adding, “We hope that this program will widen visitors’ views of the world.”
Asian Heritage Event Schedule:
3 p.m. Members of the New Haven Chinese Cultural Cooperative will present, “Celebrating the Harvest Moon” with traditional Chinese music, poetry, and dance performances. To celebrate the season of fall—often associated with the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, the harvest moon, and nostalgia in Chinese culture—the group will share a Teresa Teng favorite about the moon and love; a bi-lingual poem from North Song Dynasty; an energetic percussion song; a potato-digging harvest song from Shanxi; traditional Chinese dance, and more. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, families gather the same way Americans do at Thanksgiving. Similarly, because some are unable to make it home for the holiday, many Mid-Autumn Festival works are about nostalgia and homesickness.
4:15 p.m. Members of Yale Rangeela—Yale University’s first undergraduate Bollywood fusion dance team—will share South Asian culture with a variety of fused dance styles and their own vibrant energy.
5:15 p.m.. Jennifer Heikkila Diaz, co-chair of the Asian Pacific American Coalition of Connecticut, will hold a screening of, “Off the Menu: Asian America,” followed by a Q&A session on what it means to be Asian in America. The feature-length documentary offers a road trip into the kitchens, factories, temples, and farms of Asian Pacific America, exploring how their relationship to food reflects their evolving communities. “In Connecticut, our two largest groups under the Asian and Pacific Islander umbrella are the Chinese and Indian communities, and most people in those two communities celebrate one of these holidays,” says Diaz. “I hope the audience will learn more about our complex and diverse AAPI community—whether they are a member of it or not—and consider how identity and culture evolve, especially in diaspora communities.”