Soon-Mi Yoo

BA, Yonsei University, Korea ; MFA, Massachusetts Collge of Art and Design

Korean-born Soon-Mi Yoo works with various media and genres, including photography, film, installation and text to explore marginalized histories.

Her work has been exhibited at festivals internationally, including Oberhausen, Pompidou Center, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and Seattle IFF, and galleries across the country, including the International Center of Photography and Boston Center for the Arts. Her films include Pink (2011), Dangerous Supplement (2006), ISAHN (2004), ssitkim: talking to the dead (2004), faith (1999), Do Roo (Circling Back, 1994). Her photographs of the Comfort Women (victims of sexual slavery in the Japanese “rape camps” during WW II) survivors are published in “Comfort Women Speak: Testimony from Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military ” in 2000. “When I encountered the Comfort Women survivors in 1998, they taught me to focus on specific personal experiences and memory and to pay attention to the meaning of silence in the historical narrative… By crossing the boundary between documentary, personal essay, and experimental film categories, I seek to disorder the standard narratives of history and to produce an alternative telling. Through uneasy juxtaposition of fragments, the layers of memory reach for the power of feeling. It opens up a space of imagination where it is possible to make connections between personal experience and public memory, historical perspective and private suffering.” Soon-Mi Yoo is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Media Arts Fellowship, a fellowship from the American Photography Institute, the Corcoran Alumni Award for Excel-lence, and the National Asian American Telecommunications Association Grant.