by Brian Whitehead | Special to the Courier

While teaching English in Ipoh, Malaysia, during her Fulbright year, Rhian Moore would often take her class to the theater to watch U.S. blockbusters.

Rarely, she found, did an Asian American actor appear on screen.

Toward the end of that 2018-19 academic year in Malaysia’s second-largest city, a student asked the 2018 Pomona College graduate — a Burmese American raised in South Pasadena, California — if she would be returning home to Myanmar, a country she’d only visited once.

“I had served for the past year as a cultural ambassador for the U.S.,” Moore said, “and my students, through no fault of their own, didn’t really understand that I could be an Asian and an American at the same time. Their concept of Asians and where they could belong, where they could live, was crafted by what they were seeing on their screens. With pop culture being the United States’ greatest export, I felt this responsibility, this calling, to try to change that.”

Since returning to Southern California, Moore has amplified Asian and Pacific Islander voices in entertainment as head of programs at CAPE, the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, the longest-running non-profit creating opportunities and driving change for API success in Hollywood.

Late last year, Moore cracked Forbes’ yearly “30 Under 30” list of rising Hollywood and entertainment groundbreakers.

“It’s an honor to have my work recognized in this way,” the 29-year-old said. “I try to champion other people’s work and careers as much as possible, and it’s not often that people who are behind the scenes in the industry get such visibility.”

Exploring music and identity at Pomona

The daughter of immigrants, Moore was steered toward Ivy League schools and UC system while in high school. Not until a Scripps-bound high school classmate suggested she check out Pomona College did Moore learn she could flourish intellectually in Claremont.

Music filled Moore’s childhood, her father’s healthy love of classical music the impetus for her to start piano and violin at an early age. “Music was a great way to express my emotions,” she said, and while violin became more of a hobby over time, Moore enjoyed performing symphony music as part of an ensemble.

Pomona’s liberal arts education gave Moore the freedom to study music and pre-med requirements like biology simultaneously, each discipline rooted in academia. She played with the Pomona College Orchestra and pursued a degree in music.

Associate Professor of Music Gibb Schreffler recalled the reflectiveness Moore brought “to each topic in our ethnomusicology classes and to her senior thesis, which queried the visibility of minoritized Asian American identities.”

“Rhian took advantage of her studies in music to process ideas about how her own Burmese heritage found ways to be legible musically, both among the mainstream social landscape and within local Asian communities,” Schreffler said.

Moore also found belonging in Pomona College’s Asian American Resource Center under former Director Kēhaulani Vaughn, current Director Asena Taione-Filihia and Sefa Aina, director of the Draper Center.

“I was able to unpack my own identity as an Asian American [at the AARC] and really understand what it was about being Southeast Asian, about being Burmese American, that made me unique and built my experiences,” Moore said.

Moore joined the AARC’s Southeast Asian Committee and created Pomona’s first Southeast Asian Film Festival. She also volunteered with the Saturday Tongan Education Program, providing academic tutoring, co-cultural activities and resources to Tongan American students in the Inland Empire.

Creating ladders for API creatives

Moore’s years conducting API community and representation work at Pomona prepped her well for CAPE, which already had industry renowned flagship fellowships for new writers and mid-level Hollywood executives when she started there in 2021.

With an established ecosystem of creatives invested in telling API stories on the small and silver screens, Moore separated CAPE’s pillars of support into three main categories:

For writers, she launched CAPE’s Showrunner Incubator to give API writers on the cusp of developing and showrunning — a top-level producer position in TV production — their first series the tools, business savvy and network to succeed.

For creative executives, she started CAPE’s Emerging Executives Committee to build a community of API assistants and coordinators hoping to make the difficult jump from support staff roles to the junior executive ranks.

And for filmmakers, Moore, her team at CAPE, and former Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Janet Yang established the Julia S. Gouw Short Film Challenge, which awards $25,000 grants to four API women and non-binary filmmakers each year to help bring their short films from script to screen.

“Fewer than 0.2% of all directors are Asian women,” Moore said. “And with directors, a major calling card, a major vehicle for your career, could be a short film, which can be leveraged as a proof of concept for an eventual feature. However, a short film, even now, is expensive to make.”

CAPE’s Short Film Challenge has funded films that have premiered at festivals such as Sundance and South by Southwest. One winner has been long listed for the Oscars, and others have propelled directors to feature-length films and other directing opportunities.

“Investing in filmmakers at the emerging stages is daring, it’s risky,” Moore said. “But it’s the way to create change.”

And the risk pays off.

Moore last year led the new Rising Filmmaker Finishing Fund, which supports the career longevity of API filmmakers by providing $50,000 post-production grants to complete their second, third, fourth, or fifth feature film.

Director Beth De Araújo was an inaugural grantee, and her film “Josephine” premiered at Sundance earlier this year, with Moore is credited as an executive producer on the thriller-drama starring Gemma Chan and Channing Tatum.

Giving API communities humanity

While CAPE alumni are staffed across every major TV network and streaming platform, Moore’s priorities must evolve with the industry.

When TV opportunities have contracted, she’s found spaces for API creatives in microdramas, narrative audio, gaming, and animation. “We’re focused on career sustainability and support,” she said.

One of the first programs Moore helped launch at CAPE — the Animation Directors Accelerator — helped a visual development artist in the inaugural year of the program land a role as production designer on the 2025 Netflix smash “KPop Demon Hunters.”

Another CAPE alumnus is a producer on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” and has hired API writers from the organization’s New Writers Fellowship to help tell API stories.

“One of the most effective ways to spread a message is to make sure it’s seen on millions of screens,” Moore said. “Making sure API people are visible and given humanity in stories we see on TV and in films will affect how we’re treated and seen in real life. That’s why we’re fighting to have API stories and API storytellers be as much a part of the narrative as any other story.”

Moore says her work at CAPE and resulting Forbes recognition is a testament to her time at the Pomona College’s Asian American Resource Center.

“I try to embody what I learned at the Asian American Resource Center in my own leadership,” Moore said. “A lot of their practices factor into my leadership style, so this recognition [from Forbes] is a way of saying that how they lead works.”