lk2994@columbia.edu | CV
Education
Columbia University
New York, NY || MFA 2025
Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera
Milan, Italy || BFA 2019
About
Leena Kim is a visual artist and filmmaker based in New York, NY. She received her BFA from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Italy, and her MFA from Columbia University in 2025. Her practice examines the fragility of the human condition in contemporary society, where connections feel both instant and elusive, marked by moments of desire, detachment, and emotional drift.
Rooted in nature, her work often incorporates the ocean as a recurring presence, evoking impermanence and reflecting the shifting nature of memory and time. Its vastness and fluidity echo how we move between presence and absence, navigating the spaces in between. She follows these cycles—seeking and escaping, connecting and retreating—within digital spaces that blur the line between reality and longing. Through reflective environments that give form to unspoken emotions and untold stories, she constructs emotional landscapes that serve as both mirrors and contemplative spaces for the transience and disconnection of modern life. In these works, the moving image becomes a site where the tension between representation and materiality unfolds, where memory is not only depicted but reshaped through the medium itself. Projected images, layered sound, and digital textures draw attention to how recollection is mediated, asking what remains and what dissolves when memory passes through light, screen, and sound.
Her work has been exhibited at Wallach Gallery, ZAZ 10 Times Square Gallery, and SK Gallery in New York, and her video works have been selected for festivals such as the Seoul International Short Film Festival and the Tokyo International Short Film Festival.
Selected Exhibitions / Film Screenings