K-Space International, Inc. is a new iteration of Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™, a Peacemaking Theater™ company led by playwright/director Kyoung H. Park. Between 2011 and 2024, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ devised four full-length plays and created over 45 community-based, experimental projects. Centering stories of (im)migration, queerness, violence and the ways these intersect in communities of color, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ invested over $975,000 to support 400+ artists of color and served 11,000+ audience members worldwide.
Between 2024-2026, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ dismantled its non-profit status and reorganized itself as a minority-owned, artist corporation in order to protect the intellectual property of Kyoung H. Park. In this new business model, K-Space resumes production of new work to be distributed by our sister-company, KPB New York.
Mission, Vision & Values
Mission
K-Space is a public benefit corporation whose mission is to work with artists, non-artists, and local communities to transform experiences of oppression into peace messages through performance. K-Space creates work with interdisciplinary and multicultural ensembles of artists to uplift communities of color to create a culture of peace that provides social cohesion, spiritual healing, and radical knowledge.
Vision
K-Space envisions a world where all people have agency, liberation and healing and radically imagines a culture of peace where individuals have the capacity to transform themselves and communities transform through collective action. Based on our theory of change, we actively engage in a regenerative, peace-making process in which we scale the impact of our work through campaign-based organizing; build systems of accountability centering fairness, equity and disruption; and co-design processes that are well-resourced to ensure the safety, health, and ongoing education of our artists and communities.
Values
Delight
We center joy and rest in our creative endeavors. We prioritize people over labor, seeking consensus and consent.
Respect
We affirm personal boundaries and individual needs, in order to properly cultivate collective wisdom within our community.
Gratitude
We recognize our gifts and privileges by appreciating failure and success as equal opportunities to learn from lived experience.
Our History
Since its founding, K-Space has devised four full-length plays—disOriented, TALA, PILLOWTALK, NERO — and through Community Co-Lab, co-created over 45 community-based, experimental projects including performances for new media.
K-Space’s work centers stories of (im)migration, queerness, identity and the ways these intersect in communities of color; it’s described as “intensely personal” by American Theater Magazine and “very much of this moment” by the New York Times.
Since 2011, K-Space has served 412 artists and our work has been seen by 11,243 audience members. Since 2022, our digital programming had over 6,000 online viewers. Through our Community Co-Lab program, we formalize community partnerships with arts and culture organizations, academic institutions, and grass-roots organizations such as The Blasian March, Asians4Abolition, GAPIMNY and The Exponential Festival to co-design free public programming through a community-care based framework. During the COVID-19 pandemic, K-Space distributed over 550 free pre-packaged food and personal hygiene products, 6,750 PPE items, and hot meals for 300+ local community members with support from local BIDS including Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Flatbush Nostrand Junction. Our Black & Asian solidarity work received a 2021 American Express/APAP Innovation grant, a 2022 Innovation Award from the NYC Office for the Prevention of Hate-Crimes and Kyoung was awarded a 2024 Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement Award for Transformational Practice from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Our First Decade (2011 – 2021)
K-Space International, Inc. was founded in 2011 as Pacific Beat Collective by playwright and director Kyoung H. Park, who spent 10 years researching contemporary political theater models in Brazil, England, India, South Korea, and New York, melding his graduate education in peace studies and playwriting while working with theater companies such as Augusto Boal’s Centro de Teatro do Oprimido, Royal Court Theater, Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, and Lee Breuer/Mabou Mines. The dramaturgical question behind our work is: why make theater in times of war?
K-Space grew from an underground collective of like-minded artists gathering in a midtown apartment to a devising theater company creating work for our community, which is primarily queer, Asian-American, Latinx, and immigrant.
In 2011, K-Space associate produced the World Premiere of disOriented, a family drama based on Kyoung’s matrilineage that delved into North Korean politics with contemporary Korean fan dancing. American Theater Magazine described disOriented as “juicy” and Kyoung’s “most intensely personal” play. disOriented was produced by Theater C and featured in The Brooklyn Rail, OffOffOnline, Korea Times, chosen as a Flavorpill Editor’s Pick, awarded a 2010 Princess Grace Special Projects grant and nominated for Best Choreography in 2011 by the New York Innovative Theater Awards.
In 2012, K-Space produced workshop productions of TALA at HERE Arts Center and Columbia University’s New Works Now Festival at ToRoNaDa Theater, under the mentorship of Lee Breuer. TALA Premiered in January 2015 at the Performance Project @ University Settlement, where Kyoung was an Artist-in-Residence. TALA was a Time Out Critic’s Pick, received rave reviews, was featured in the Asian-American Arts Alliance’s January Town Hall and produced with support of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
In 2015, K-Soace produced a workshop production of PILLOWTALK at the BRIC Arts Media Center. PILLOWTALK is an intimate, gay bedroom drama about Sam and Back, an interracial gay couple whose recent marriage comes to a crux. Staged as a contemporary pas de deux, PILLOWTALK asks: can communities of color truly celebrate marriage equality in times of #BlackLivesMatter? Following an artist residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and a second workshop production at LaGuardia Performing Art Center’s Rough Draft Festival, PILLOWTALK received its World Premiere at The Tank (January 2018) as part of The Exponential Festival and headlined the Consortium of Asian-American Theaters and Artists (CAATA) “Radical Acts” Festival in Victory Gardens in Chicago (August 2018). “A beautiful production… PILLOWTALK is a political work, and feels very much of this moment,” wrote The New York Times.
In 2018, K-Space launched Community Co-Lab, an arts for change initiative strategically outlining our foci of work under the following four axes: Creating Peace, Queering the Social Order, Securing Cultural Democracy and Representation, and Devising the Future. Through Community Co-Lab, our goal is to ensure that our community-based work is designed as participatory art-making wherein systems of oppression are made visible in order to disrupt cycles of violence by radically imagining a culture of peace.
Our Second Decade (2021 – Present)
K-Space underwent a long-term, strategic planning process with support from a 2018-2019 Intercultural Leadership Institute (ILI) Fellowship and 2018-2020 Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) Leadership Fellows Program resulting in a 10-year strategic plan for the organization.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Park assembled a group of female and non-binary leaders of color in our community to incorporate K-Space as a 501c3 non-profit organization to execute this plan.
Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™, Inc. incorporated as a non-profit on March 17, 2021 and received 501(c)3 tax-exemption status on May 11, 2021. As a non-profit, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ grew exponentially supported by private foundations and grants from the NEA and New York State Council of the Arts to become the first BIPOC-led theater to provide union-rate wages in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
In 2020, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ also began Research & Development work for NERO, with generous support from the MAP Fund, Venturous Theater Fund, Jerome Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Dramatist Guild Fellowship program.
Additionally, Community Co-Lab grew to provide remunerated strategic partnerships which included new rounds of community-engagement activities and mutual aid under the themes of “Whiteness on Fire.”
In 2022, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ received its first NEA grant to commission its next work-in-progress, OTHER NO MORE, which arose from a new axis of Community Co-Lab activities called “Decolonizing Nature” which centered locally-drive community-care and community safety strategies.
In 2024, the World Premiere of NERO was held exclusively online as a “streamplay” production filmed with support from Pregones/PRTT and its ASAP/Artist Space At Pregones initiative, with lead funding from the Ford Foundation and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
On Mar. 8, 2024, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™’s Board of Directors unanimously voted to dissolve its 501c3 status and filed for dissolution with the New York State Attorney General on May 6th, 2025. Our dissolution statement was quoted on the New York Times on Jun. 21, 2024.
Prior to dissolution, KPB’s community was nurtured through partnerships based on mutuality and community-care. Our audience demographic in 2020 was 34% queer APIA, 33% queer BIPOC, 22% White allies, and 11% arts funders. Through a “pay what you can” ticketing scale to ensure continued public access to our events, our audience identified in 2024 as 52% White, 14% APIA, 14% Latine, 6% Black/African-American, 5% Arab American, and 3% Native American.
Between 2024-2026, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ dismantled its non-profit status and reorganized itself as a minority-owned, artist corporation. In order to protect the intellectual property of Kyoung H. Park, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat™ split into two public benefit corporations, K-Space International, Inc. and KPB New York, Inc. Both public benefit corporations were incorporated on March 27, 2026 in the state of New York.
Programs
K-Space is currently developing new theatrical plays, feature films, and episodic television series through three main programs, Peacemaking Theater™, K-Space Studio, and Community Co-Lab.
- Peacemaking Theater™ researches, develops and produces devised theater shared nationally and internationally through touring and online streaming.
- K-Space Studio incubates and produces exceptionally weird film, episodic and new media series uplifting misfit stories and talent unseen.
- Community Co-Lab collaborates with local, community-based, social justice organizations, academic and cultural institutions, to co-create community-driven events and participatory research to imagine a culture of peace.
