Linda Mabalot

Mabalot was born in Fairfield, California, and grew up in Liberty Island, a town in the Sacramento River Delta. Mabalot spent most of her youth helping her father, a first generation Filipino American, with work on land that he leased. == Career ==

Mabalot attended Dixon High School and later graduated from the University of California, Davis in 1975 with a degree in biology. Throughout the early 1980's, Visual Communications faced bankruptcy and a significant loss of staff. Mabalot and Nancy Araki, a Japanese American staffer at Visual Communications and the later Director of Community Affairs at the Japanese American National Museum, worked to restructure the organization and save it from its financial issues. Mabalot and Araki succeeded in pulling Visual Communications out of debt by developing a new structure which included requiring the monetization of Visual Communications' resources, such as using the photographic dark room, and focusing on smaller scale projects given that larger projects had put the organization in debt in the first place. Mabalot became executive director of Visual Communications in 1985. == Legacy ==

Mabalot was known for encouraging the support of young, up and coming Asian Pacific American filmmakers at the start of their careers. She helped filmmakers including Taiwanese American director Justin Lin, who is known for directing Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and a number of the Fast and Furious franchise films. Mabalot allowed Lin to use the Visual Communications' offices for a film on the Asian American model minority myth, and she supported him in the earlier days of his media career. According to Lin, “When Linda read the script, she really got it. She helped to empower me as an artist to explore the issues I wanted to explore, to stay true to the characters and issues without having to water them down or worry about what so-and-so in the community might think. What she brought was unconditional support.” == Death ==

On May 19, 2003, Mabalot passed at the age of 49 at the West Hills Medical Center from cancer. == Filmography and Television ==

• Manong (1977) • Planting Roots: A Pictorial History of Filipinos in California (1981) • Moving the Image (1992,1993,1995,1996) for International Channel Network • Hiroshima 20 Years Later (1996) == Publications ==

• Moving the Image: 20 Years of Independent Asian Pacific Media Arts (1990) • Imaging: A Century of Asian Women in Film (1998) == Awards ==

• Steve Tatsukawa Memorial Fund • Vesta Award in Media Arts, Women's Building == References ==