Sooah Kwak Welcome! This website is best viewed on desktop.
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Hello! I am Sooah Kwak (she/her), a researcher in anthropology, museum professional, and multimedia artist based between Seoul and New York.

My research traces how power settles into bodies and landscapes, unevenly shaping both human and non-human life through material and symbolic manifestations. My recent work follows waste as it accumulates across the two Koreas and broader circuits of East Asia, treating it as a sedimentary record of colonial legacies, state violence, and neoliberal development.

The theoretical arc of my work builds on my academic training alongside professional experience in museums. I am an incoming PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, holding an MA in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University and dual undergraduate degrees—a BAS in Art and Technology and a BA in STS—from Sogang University. At present, I assist research for the Curator of Asian Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History.

My creative projects, exhibited across Korea, the UK, and the US, weave together years of climate and animal rights advocacy with my academic research. In a past life, I worked on humanities-centered AI at both a research lab and a startup.

Contact ｡.｡･*

sooah.k [at] columbia [dot] edu

bluesky

Table of Contents

Experimental Ethnography