Grace Han is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History -- Film and Media Studies track at Stanford University. Her dissertation, Encounters with the Generative Archive, examines a range of contemporary artists and filmmakers who use digital animation, Small Language Models, and generative AI to negotiate silences in their personal and family histories. She proposes an aesthetic theory of the “generative archive” to define how predictive and postcinematic media change the way we memorialize the past. Overall, her research pushes back against the novelty discourse surrounding AI art and film, and instead contextualizes CG/AI-generated media within longstanding theories of the photographic and filmic archive.
Her writing spans the genealogy of media theory (Handbuch Medientheorien im 21. Jahrhundert, Springer Nature), countercultural US animation (Encyclopedia for Animation Studies, Bloomsbury Academic; forthcoming), and global Asian animation in the digital age (In Media Res, ACAS, Fantasy/Animation). She has been a recipient of the Society for Animation Studies' Maureen Furniss Best Student Essay on Animated Media Award and has an article under peer review for VERGE: Studies in Global Asias. More broadly, her research reveals digital animation's deeply transmedial and transnational entanglements in the 21st century.
Her research is supported by the Vice Provost for Graduate Education's DARE Fellowship and Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. She has been invited to share her research on AI art and film at The Alan Turing Institute, SIGGRAPH Asia, BAFTSS, and research universities across the UK, US, and Hong Kong.
Beyond academia, she has published and edited popular film writing as a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, prioritizing coverage on global Asian and diaspora film. She is a regular contributor to the Korean Film Council's KO-Pick News column and has worked to diversify film criticism with Sundance and TIFF. She currently serves on the boards for Society for Animation Studies and GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ+ Entertainment Critics, and organizes the Digital Aesthetics Research Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center.
She likes to read comics and garden (that is, touch grass) in her free time.