Dr Sangjoon Lee is a scholar of Asian cinema and media whose interests span South Korean cinema and popular culture, international film festival, the Cultural Cold War, and the film and digital media industries in contemporary Asia. He has extensively investigated Asian cinema in its socio-historical and industrial contexts, paying particular attention to issues of the national and the transnational, questions of ownership and control, the new regionalism, industrial networks, and the unprecedented cultural flows and mixing in cinema and media around Asia and the globe.  
 
Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (Cornell University Press, 2020; Korean edition in 2023 and Chinese edition in 2024) and the editor/co-editor of Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Rediscovering Korean Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2019; 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title), The South Korean Film Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2024), Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), and The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (Routledge, 2024). He is also the guest editor of "Is Netflix Riding the Korean Wave or Vice Versa?" (International Journal of Communication, 2023), “Reorienting Asian Cinema in the Age of the Chinese Film Market (Screen, 2019), “The Chinese Film Industry: Emerging Debates” (Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2019), and “Transmedia and Asian Cinema” (Asian Cinema, 2020). Lee is currently completing a new monograph Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema's Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas, while working on a new edited volume on Netflix and the South Korean Media Industry. Lee is the recipient of the Jay Leyda Award for Academic Excellence (2011) and the David H. Culbert Prize for the Best Article in Film and Media History by an Established Scholar (2019). Lee's works have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian.  
 
In addition, Lee has taken an active role in leading, organizing, and coordinating academic activities as well as film festivals and screenings. ‘Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media’ (University of Michigan, 2012), ‘Asian Cinema and the Chinese Film Market’ (Nanyang Technological University and King's College London, 2017), ‘The South Korean Film Industry’ (Nanyang Technological University and the University of Michigan, 2021), and ‘Is Netflix Riding the Korean Wave or Vice Versa?’ (Nanyang Technological University, Simon Fraser University, Seoul National University, and Yonsei University, 2022) are just a few of the international film and media studies conferences he has organized. Lee’s most recent academic event is ‘The Origins of the South Korean Film Renaissance.’ This Lingnan University-University of Washington joint film studies conference was held at M+ in Hong Kong on 2-4 November 2023. 
 
Lee holds a Ph.D. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Cinema Studies in 2011 and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2005. Prior to joining the School of Creative Media in January 2024, Lee taught at Lingnan University (2022-2023), Nanyang Technological University (2015-2022), and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2012-2014). He was also a visiting professor at the Australian National University, Yonsei University, and Dankook University. Lee is a founding director of Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab), a virtual film studies initiative.