Annette Miae Kim

Artist Bio

Annette Miae Kim (b.1968 New York) comes from a family of refugees, immigrants, and citizens with family members in North Korea, South Korea, Germany, and Ethiopia. Her lived experiences are foundational to the themes in her work of migration and diaspora, borders and bodies. Having spent time living in Vietnam, China, Kenya, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France as well as in the United States’ rural Georgia and urban New York, she now lives and works in Los Angeles, experimenting with making maps. Her cartographies take the form of scroll paintings, cinematic videos, interactive media, and installations, contemplating the tension between the physical, material world and the digital world. Her maps also explore the role and limits of text and language in placemaking. Her social practice research involves long-term collaborations with community-based arts organizations, building cultural asset maps that recover histories and narratives of marginalized peoples and places. She is a co-founder of RAP, the Race, Arts, and Place collective. Her work has been shown internationally. She earned her BA in Studio Art and Architecture from Wellesley College, MA in Public Policy from Harvard University, MA in Visual Studies and PhD in Urban Planning from UC Berkeley. She is faculty at USC’s Price School of Public Policy, with a courtesy appointment at the Roski School of Art and Design.