Education

Columbia University

New York, NY || Visual Arts, MFA, 2025

Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera

Milan, Italy || BFA 2019

About

Leena Kim is a visual artist based in New York, working primarily in video, installation, and text. She received her BFA from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Italy and her MFA from Columbia University in 2025. Her work has been exhibited at Wallach Gallery, SK Gallery, and theBlanc Gallery in New York, among others. She has created public video installations in Times Square with ZAZ10TS Gallery, and more recently, for Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. Her video works have been selected for the Seoul International Short Film Festival and the Tokyo International Short Film Festival. She was the recipient of the Andrew Fisher Fellowship in 2024–25, and is currently an artist-in-residence in the 2025–26 Arts Intensive Study Program (AISP) at Fire Station Doha, under Qatar Museums.

Her work examines how images shape emotion, time, and perception in the contemporary world. She explores the tension between mediated experience and lived perception—how screens, archives, and visual systems construct our understanding of presence and distance. Her installations often unfold as projected environments where moving images transform the spatial and sensory rhythm of a place, shifting perception from documentation to sensation. She translates these perceptual states into cinematic and spatial forms that blur the line between image and experience, where atmosphere carries emotion and landscape holds memory and connection. Through the interplay of image, voice, and rhythm, Kim constructs spaces where perception stretches and time becomes felt.

Selected Exhibitions / Screenings

2025 | Public Commission, Salesforce Tower Top, San Francisco, CA

2025 | Fault Lines, theblanc Gallery, New York, NY

2025 | MFA Thesis Exhibition, Wallach Gallery, New York, NY

2025 | Low Library Rotunda Exhibitions 24-25, Low Memorial Library, New York, NY

2025 | Celestial Navigation, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, NY

2025 | Intimate Aftergesture, Parsons 25 East Gallery, New York, NY

2024 | Seoul International Short Film Festival, Official Selection, Seoul, South Korea

2024 | Currents, SK Gallery, New York, NY

2024 | Tokyo International Short Film Festival, Official Selection, Tokyo, Japan

2024 | Tokyo Lift-Off Film Festival, Judge’s Select, Tokyo, Japan

2024 | Columbia University First Year MFA Exhibition, Wallach Gallery, New York, NY

2023 | Leaps of Consciousness, ZAZ 10 Times Square Gallery, New York, NY