ABOUT
For more than twenty years, I’ve worked across universities, museums, cultural institutions, and communities—as an artist, educator, scholar, and collaborator. I served as a tenure-track professor and hold an MFA in Painting from Yale and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
My work has taken many forms, in many places. I’ve made a documentary about a Korean traditional dancer in Hawaiʻi, redesigned museum tours to challenge inherited narratives, and taught English and civics through art with immigrant communities in Queens.
I’ve written about race and educational equity, taught painting, critical theory, and women of color feminism, designed a course on art and death, and foraged across campus for plants to turn into pigments.
Moving between these different ways of making, thinking, and teaching has shaped how I see. I am endlessly curious about how we make meaning and what we do with it.
My worldview has been shaped by being a first-generation Korean American, growing up in Queens, New York, and the many places and communities my work has taken me since. I now live in Phoenix, Arizona, with my family, our dog Yuki, and our cat Miso.
These days, much of my life happens alongside caregiving. I care for my mother, now in her eighties, and I’m raising a young son who is teaching me all over again how much there is to discover when you meet the world with fresh eyes.
All of it—the making, teaching, and caregiving—continues to shape what I notice, the questions I ask, and how I move through the world.
© Billie Lee