Los Angeles-based Gina Kim is one of the few South Korean filmmakers to produce works in Hollywood and her home country. Her award-winning films reimagine cinematic storytelling across different genres and platforms, developing a unique transnational perspective centered on female protagonists. Her five feature-length films and works of video art have screened at more than 150 prestigious international film festivals and venues including Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance, as well as such arts venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Her work has been theatrically released to critical acclaim in Europe, Asia and the United States. According to Variety, "Kim's highly sensitive camera turns the film into a chamber-piece hushed eroticism and surprising narrative grip." Le Figaro said, "Kim is a fearless feminist who conceals an extreme sensitivity." In 2018, The Hollywood Reporter selected Kim as one of “5 South Korean Talents to Watch” noting Kim’s pioneering efforts in Asian cinema.

Invisible Light (2003), hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a "deeply introspective and accomplished art film," was selected by Film Comment as one of the 10 best films of 2003.

Never Forever (2007), starring Jung-woo Ha and Vera Farmiga, was the first co-production between the United States and South Korea. Kim was subsequently nominated in the Best New Director category at the Motion Picture Association of Korea’s Daejong Film Awards (the Korean equivalent of the Academy Awards) and was awarded the Jury prize at the 2007 Deauville American Film Festival.

Faces of Seoul (2009) premiered at the 66th annual Venice Film Festival, where Kim also served as a jury member. In 2018, Kim and L’Atelier des Cahiers published Seoul, Visages d’une Ville, a trilingual multimedia photo book essay based on the documentary.

In 2016, Final Recipe was wide-released in China in more than 3,240 theaters. The Hollywood Reporter noted how the director "conjures a non-exotic piece out of a territory-trotting narrative, where every place is made to seem like home." Prior to its release, Final Recipe was selected as the opening film in the Culinary Cinema sections of the Berlin and San Sebastian international film festivals.

Kim's latest works include a virtual reality trilogy about the issue of U.S. military camp towns in South Korea. The first of the trilogy, Bloodless, (2017) transforms the controversial issue of crimes by U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea into a personal and emotional experience. Bloodless received Best VR awards at Venice International Film Festival, Thessaloniki International Film Festival and Bogotá Short Film Festival. Filmmaker Magazine featured Bloodless as the Best VR Storytelling of 2017. The second part of the trilogy Tearless (2020) premiered at the Venice Film Festival accompanied by metaverse of “Monkey House,” a medical prison that detained U.S. comfort women who were suspected to have STDs.

Kim is widely recognized as an innovative instructor who uses media for social justice. She has taught at Harvard University as the first Asian woman at her department and was awarded a Certificate of Teaching Excellence in 2014. In 2018, Variety listed Kim as one of the “Top Teachers in Film, TV” noting Kim’s “keen understanding of the future of entertainment technology.”

Sean Metzger is a scholar who works at the intersections of several fields: visual culture (art, fashion, film, theater) as well as Asian American, Caribbean, Chinese, film, performance and sexuality studies. He has written two books. Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Indiana University Press, 2014) demonstrates how aesthetics, gender, politics, economics and race are interwoven through particular forms of dress in what Metzger calls the Sino/American interface from the late 19th through early 21st centuries. The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020) complicates discourses of globalization through an examination of aesthetic objects and practices situated in cities from Shanghai to Cape Town. The Chinese Atlantic won the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies and the 2021 John W. Frick Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society for best book on theater and performance of/in the Americas. Metzger has published more than 75 articles and reviews in various print and online venues.

He has worked extensively to increase collaboration among thinkers and artists from different disciplines and has co-edited numerous interdisciplinary collections of essays in this vein: Embodying Asian/American Sexualities with Gina Masequesmay (Lexington, 2009); Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures with Olivia Khoo (Intellect, 2009); Race, Space, Place: The Making and Unmaking of Freedoms in the Atlantic World with Michaeline Crichlow (Cultural Dynamics, 2009); Islands, Images, Imaginaries with Francisco J. Hernández Adrián and Michaeline Crichlow (Third Text, 2014); Expressions of Asian Caribbeanness with Andil Gosine and Patricia Mohamed (Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2019); and Transient Performance with Kimberly Chantal Welch (Cultural Dynamics, 2020). He is co-editor with Roberta Mock of The Methuen Drama Handbook to Theatre and Gender (forthcoming). With John Clum, he edited an anthology of plays called Awkward Stages: Plays about Growing Up Gay (Cambria, 2015). He has been an associate editor of Cultural Dynamics for several years and and is currently the editor of Theatre Journal for which he curated special issues entitled Minor Asias (2020), AI (2021), Installation (2022) and Refugee Processing (forthcoming 2023).

Metzger also strives to create educational and scholarly networks from the local to the global. He served on the Executive Board of Performance Studies international for six years, serving as the organization’s president from 2016-2020. He then co-convened PSi’s inaugural Committee on Anti-Racist Actions and Practices (2020-2021). In 2014, he taught for the UC Education Abroad Program at Fudan University (China). He travels often, giving guest lectures in the U.S. and abroad. He was a fellow at the Asian American Studies Center at UNC-Chapel Hill (2021-2022). He worked for nine years as a UCLA Faculty-in-Residence, where he worked to engage students with Los Angeles as a global media capital. He consults for major entertainment companies.

Before his arrival at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 2012, Metzger was an assistant professor of English, theater studies, and Asian & Middle Eastern studies at Duke University. He was named the inaugural Fulbright Research Chair in North American Society and Culture at Concordia University (Canada) in 2008 and a Framing the Global fellow with Indiana University and Indiana University Press (2011-2018). At the beginning of his academic career, he served as adjunct faculty at Antioch University, Loyola Marymount University and the USC School of Dramatic Arts. In addition to his academic work, he spent three years in social services at the L.A. LGBT Center and as an independent consultant to school districts and other non-profit institutions.

Metzger holds a Ph.D. in theater (twentieth century performance and culture), an M.A. in comparative literature and a B.A. summa cum laude in humanities and psychology.

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