Grace Han is a PhD candidate in Art History -- Film and Media Studies track at Stanford University, where she thinks about digital animation aesthetics. Her dissertation builds a theory of the "generative archive," where artists "fill in the gaps" of their archives with generative media. 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, distribution flows, and computational mediation. She has writing on digital cinema/animation of South Korea, Japan, China, and the U.S. in Animation Studies, Association for Chinese Animation Studies, Handbook on Media Theories of the 21st Century (Springer Nature), to name a few. She has pending publications for Encyclopedia of Animation Studies (Bloomsbury Academic), In Media Res, and VERGE: Studies in Global Asias.
Beyond academia, she has also published and edited popular film writing as a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, and has works to diversify film criticism with Sundance and TIFF. She currently serves on the board 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.