Marissa Halago

Marissa (she/her) is a senior at Yale studying Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Education Studies. Born and raised on O‘ahu, she’s the founder of the Filipino Curriculum Project, a student-driven initiative creating curricula and successfully passing policy to adopt the nation’s first high school Filipino history, culture, identity course in Hawai‘i’s Department of Education. Her work has instilled a passion for collective action to innovate pedagogy that contextualizes and critiques power structures while centering student autonomy. Last spring, she participated in a comparative critical urban studies program in Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Cape Town where she researched institutional and communal memory in urban space. On campus, she’s a peer liaison mentor for first-year students at the Asian American Cultural Center, where she also served as a former Political Action & Education student coordinator and former co-president of KASAMA: the Filipinx Club, where she co-launched a student advocacy movement that successfully implemented the first Filipino language classes at Yale in 2025.
 
Marissa’s work and lived experiences have propelled her academic interests on the intersections of U.S. colonialism, racialized labor migration, and resistance movements. She spent her summer in the Philippines and Hawai‘i conducting interviews with Filipino high school teachers about their experiences and pedagogies teaching Filipino history – specifying on their approaches to regime, revolution, migration, and civic action – while creating a transnational learning exchange in collaboration with educators on resistance and solidarity against colonial structures in the Philippines and Hawai‘i. Last year, she was a student museum assistant for the Peabody’s Hall of the Pacific and she now serves as a Teach for America Ignite tutor and a fellow at the Hawai‘i Coalition for Immigrant Rights.