Laura Lee, Ph.D.

Laura Lee is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, and she teaches courses on film and animation aesthetics and history. Her research centers on film, animation, art, and adjacent media, and she has a special love for international cinema and documentary.

Lee studied at Columbia University, University of Iowa, and Yale University before completing her Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She specializes in Japanese cinema and visual culture, and her research in this area focuses on the visual forms associated with Japanese modernity, avant-garde art practices in the 1960s, contemporary image culture, and popular art and media. Specific interests include film theory and aesthetics, screen technologies and intermedia, issues in global contemporary art, and animation and new media history and theory. Her published work on these topics has appeared in multiple venues, and her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship.

Lee’s first book, Japanese Cinema Between Frames (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), reframes Japan’s cinema history by tracing how film has continually reshaped itself through its dynamic engagement within a shifting media ecology. In so doing, cinema has bound itself tightly with adjacent visual forms such as anime and manga to redefine itself across its history of interaction with new media, including television, video, and digital formats. Her second book, Worlds Unbound: the Art of teamLab (Intellect Books, 2022), examines the artistic production of Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, which has garnered global attention for its immersive, interactive large-scale exhibitions. The book contextualizes the creative group’s artistic production since its inception in 2001 and analyzes how teamLab’s artworks interrelate the natural world, social and institutional systems, the participatory culture of contemporary media and information networks, and the digital art experience.

In addition to ongoing research on Japanese film and animation history and culture, Lee’s current project builds on this last book by exploring how digital technologies have transformed the parameters of artistic practice and are engaging an expanded public.