Tou SaiKo Lee

Tou SaiKo Lee is an artist educator, hip-hop advocate, storyteller, and spoken word poet from St. Paul, Minnesota. Lee is known for the intergenerational performances with his late grandmother, Zuag Tsab, who performed the traditional Hmong poetry chanting kwv txhiaj for over a decade before her passing.

Lee received the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship in 2016 to focus on research of how communities of the Hmong diaspora—including communities in Vietnam, Australia, China, and Thailand— use traditional arts as ways to preserve culture. Lee has developed an arts-based curriculum titled UCL (Unified Creative Learning) as an educational tool for students to engage with cultural identity through music. Tou’s TEDx Talk titled “Reclaiming cultural identity and language through hip hop” can be found on YouTube.

Lee’s newest project facilitates teaching artist apprentices, youth, and elders in an intergenerational creative process titled Spicy Legacy Project.