A writer whom I deeply admire recently told me that I’m a mongrel, which is a pretty accurate description of who I am as a person. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, I’ve lived in seven countries, four continents. I’m a product of many cultures but U.S. institutions have played a major role in shaping my thoughts.

In Seoul, I worked as a radio announcer at (the now defunct) TBS radio station. I also worked as an interpreter, Lieutenant Junior Grade, for the Republic of Korea Navy at the Operation Headquarter in Busan and Naval Headquarter in Chungnam, acting as a liaison between U.S., Korean, and Japanese officials and admirals.

I earned my BA from Washington University in St. Louis and M.Phil from Yale University. I set out to study Japanese intellectual history in graduate school and, along the way, expanded my scope towards topics that I’m passionate about. My current PhD dissertation, named “Generic Figurations: Melodrama, Documentary, Futurology in South Korea and Japan, 1960s-1980s,” uses genre as a lens to look at the overlapping cultural history of the two countries. Generic figuration, the recursive structure in which social actors and cultural texts act upon each other, is central to understand this complex period. I look at a variety of cultural texts for this project: films, activist documentaries, video footages, criticism, novels.

With higher education going through a global seismic shift at the moment, I think about new forms of pedagogy and thinking that focuses on what matters: the aesthetic experience, its social meaning, and how to translate those into words and images.