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, photography, and installation. 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 ZAZ 10 Times Square Gallery and has been selected for a forthcoming public commission at 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 will take part as an artist in residence in the 2025–26 Arts Intensive Study Program (AISP) at Fire Station Doha, supported by Qatar Museums.

Her practice examines the fragility of the human condition in contemporary society, where connections feel both instant and elusive. She explores how digital spaces compress and abstract emotion, leaving memory fragmented and held at a distance. Working with fragments—moments that never fully settle, dissolve before taking shape, or linger as residue—she uses scripted narration, pacing, and gaps in continuity to open space for ambiguity and disjunction. Landscape, both natural and constructed, becomes a site where these tensions unfold. The ocean recurs as a central motif, evoking impermanence and the shifting nature of memory and time, its vastness and fluidity mirroring how images drift between presence and absence, connection and retreat.

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