Jung Joon Lee

Jung Joon Lee’s research and teaching interests span the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies and decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Specializing in the history and theory of photography, Lee teaches courses that engage critically with image making as a form of history making.

Lee’s book Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024) explores the discursive ways that photography in Korea and its diaspora presents an everyday cathected by 20th-century war and militarism and their ongoing pervasiveness. She is currently working on two book projects: a monograph exploring photography and art exhibitions as a space of transoceanic collaboration, kinship making and repair; and the co-edited volume Queer Feminist Elsewhere: Decolonial Making in Transpacific Art based on the 2021 RISD conference Queer/Feminist/Praxis, which Lee co-organized to bring together works by scholars and artists in Korea and the Korean diaspora. She has published in such journals as History of Photography, photographies, Trans Asia Photography, Journal of Korean Studies and PhotoResearcher. Lee’s recent publications include essays on grieving as artistic collaboration and Cold War temporality and images of transnational adoption.

In 2022–23, Lee was a society fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, researching site-specific, transpacific and intergenerational collaborative projects by Asian and Asian American artists. Lee was the visiting professor of media studies and critical theory at the Graduate School of Communication and Arts, Yonsei University in spring 2022. Prior to her studies in art history, Lee trained in urban planning and worked for a global planning consortium. Issues of urbanity remain among Lee’s major interests.