Prof. Sangjoon Lee is an expert in Asian cinema and media, with a research focus on South Korean cinema and popular culture, international film festivals, the Cultural Cold War, and the contemporary film and digital media industries in Asia. He studies the socio-historical and industrial contexts of Asian cinema, emphasizing national and transnational dynamics, ownership and control, new regionalism, industrial networks, and the tremendous cultural flows and blending in cinema and media across Asia and the world. He has been recognized with prestigious awards, including 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). His works have been translated into multiple languages, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian.

Lee has extensive teaching experience, having taught in various parts of the world. Additionally, he is the founding director of the Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab), a virtual initiative dedicated to film studies.

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; Chinese translation 電影與文化冷戰 : 美國外交與亞洲電影網絡的起源, 2024) and has edited or co-edited several significant works, including 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), 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 (2024). He has also served as guest editor for special issues such as 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). Currently, Lee is completing a monograph titled Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema’s Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas, which chronicles the seven-decade-long interactions between South Korean cinema and the diasporic Sinophone cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. He is also working on a new edited volume Netflix and South Korean Media in a Globalizing World (Brill). Lee has also played a pivotal role in leading, organizing, and coordinating a number of distinguished academic activities, film festivals, and screenings.