Stephanie S.E. Lee
Stephanie S.E. Lee (she/her) is a PhD Candidate studying works-on-paper, with research interests in transmediality, colonialisms, and critical race and ethnic studies. Her dissertation asks how popular media—woodcut prints, vernacular photography, advertisements, and picture postcards—inform the construction of ethno-national ideologies of Yellowness through the lens of France's Third Republic and Japan's Meiji and Taisho eras. Lee's research draws on 16+ months of on-site research across multi-lingual archives in French, Japanese, Korean, and English. She has presented work at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Chicago, and the Association for Asian Studies. Her curatorial credits span Dreaming of China: Chinoiserie Prints and Ceramics of the Eighteenth-century at the Rijksmuseum to Foreign Exchange: Photography between Chicago, Japan, and Germany, 1920-1960 at the Art Institute of Chicago. As a 2024-2025 Curatorial Fellow, she is co-organizing a Helen Frankenthaler works-on-paper show at the Block Museum of Art