Education
B.A. Columbia University
M.A. and Ph.D. Cornell University
Biography
Emily Hong is a Seoul-born Philadelphia-based visual anthropologist and filmmaker. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual Studies at Haverford College. Much of Emily’s scholarship has involved long-term research and collaboration with political and environmental activists and artists in Southeast Asia, particularly in Myanmar and Thailand. Emily’s short films, Get By (Hong 2014), Nobel Nok Dah (Hong, Lai, and Mihai 2015), and For My Art (Hong, Lai, and Mihai 2016), have explored solidarity and labor, womanhood and identity in the refugee experience and the gendered spectatorship of performance art, respectively. Her first feature film Above and Below the Ground (2023) tells the story of Indigenous women activists and punk rock pastors leading Myanmar's first and only country-wide environmental movement. She has screened and exhibited her work at the San José Museum of Art, the Johnson Museum of Art, BlackStar Film Festival, and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Her written scholarship (published in Cultural Anthropology, Geoforum, and Visual Anthropology Review) engages primarily with the fields of visual anthropology, political and legal anthropology, and gender and sexuality studies. Informed by her own experiences as a multiracial immigrant with ancestors on both sides of the colonial equation, Emily’s work seeks to challenge the colonial legacies of anthropology and documentary filmmaking by creating space to honor non-Western ways of knowing and being. Her research and films have been supported by the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, Bertha Foundation, Tribeca Film Institute, and the Gotham Film & Media Institute.
Recent Journal Articles
Feminist Sensory Ethnography: Embodied Filmmaking as a Politic of Necessity (Guzman and Hong 2023) in Visual Anthropology Review
The Multiply Produced Film: Collaboration, Ethnography, and Feminist Epistemology (Hong 2021) in Cultural Anthropology
More written publications available here
Above and Below the Ground (86 minutes)
In Myanmar’s first and only country-wide environmental movement, Indigenous punk rock pastors and women activists protect a sacred river from a Chinese-built megadam through protest, prayer, and Karaoke music videos.
More about Above and Below the Ground including a trailer available here