Grace Han is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies program in Art History, where she thinks about animation aesthetics. Her dissertation builds a theory of the "generative archive" through situating digital animation within a longer history of colonial epistemology, where – as noted by Saidiya Hartman and Lisa Lowe – determinations of truth have always been contingent on power. Through the lens of media philosophy and phenomenology, her project asks the timely question now intensified with the highly-visible digital crisis of fake news, DeepFakes, AI-generative media, and more: How do computers shape, cut, and fit into what we know?
More broadly, her academic work reveals digital animation’s deeply transnational entanglements in the 21st century, as seen through its outsourced production and distribution flows. She has writing on digital cinema/animation of South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. in Animation Studies, Fantasy/Animation, Association for Chinese Animation Studies, Transnational Screens, Handbook on Media Theories of the 21st Century (Springer Reference), and has another article pending in The Encyclopedia for Animation Studies (Bloomsbury Academic).
Beyond academia, she has also published and edited popular film writing as a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, and received grants to diversify film criticism from Sundance, TIFF, and Telluride. She also is involved in organizational roles with the SCMS Animated Media SIG, Society for Animation Studies, and 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.