Young Joo Lee (b. 1987, Seoul, South Korea) is a multimedia artist using animation, performance, drawing, painting, sculpture, and digital media to investigate historical concepts of “otherness,” mythmaking, and the influences of mass media. Lee grew up in a divided Korea, influenced by the boundaries and biases of colonialism and the Cold War. Studying, living, and teaching in Germany, Massachusetts, California, and other places provided opportunities to observe and experience cultural differences, universal human behaviors, and distinctions within discrimination. Based on research and personal anecdotes, Lee’s works interweave her memories with collective, imagined, or omniscient narratives, employing multiple times, spaces, screens, or points of view to challenge hegemonic stability. Often surreal or magical realist in nature, each of Lee’s projects offers a world built for the express purpose of making visible the consequences of colonialism, capitalism, classism, xenophobia, sexism, and environmental exploitation.

Lee received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and her MFA in Film from Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. Lee’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea; Medrar for Contemporary Art in Cairo, Egypt; Curitiba Biennial for Contemporary Art in Curitiba, Brazil; Kunsthaus Bregenz in Bregenz, Austria; Artspace New Haven in New Haven, CT; and Zero Field in the 798 Arts District of Beijing, China. Lee is the recipient of various awards and grants including a 2020 Seoul Foundation for the Arts and Culture Artist Grant; 2018-2020 College Fellowship in Media Practice at Harvard University; 2015-2018 Fulbright Scholarship in Film & Digital Media; and a 2010-12 DAAD Künstler Stipendium. Lee currently lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and Cambridge, MA where she is a Visiting Lecturer in Animation at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.