Hayana Kim is an interdisciplinary performance and media historian of twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Korea. Her research centers on cultures of democracy in contemporary South Korea. Her teaching is at the intersections of Korean studies, Asian diasporic studies, and theatre, performance, and media studies.

Kim is currently working on her book manuscript entitled Making P’an for a New World: The Kwangju Uprising, Women, and the Performativity of South Korean Democracy. This project, based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, investigates the role of the body and affect in advancing democracy in South Korea by illuminating various forms of performances that women in Kwangju and in broader Chŏlla Province created to bring out insurgent cultural spaces. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Asian Studies, Asian Theatre Journal, and in edited collections published by Cambridge University Press, Chonnam National University, among others.

Her research has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Mellon/Social Science Research Council (2018–19), Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (2021–22), and Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University (2021–22, declined). Other awards include the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council’s North America Research Travel Grant (2024), International Federation for Theatre Research’s Helsinki Prize (2021), Association for Theatre in Higher Education/Association for Asian Performance’s Emerging Scholars Award (2020), and Association for Theatre in Higher Education/Performance Studies Focus Group’s Emerging Scholars Award (2017).

From 2025 to 2026, Kim served as Vice President/Conference Planner of the Association for Asian Performance. In 2024, she served as Vice Chair of the Local Organizing Committee for the Annual Korean Literature Association Conference, Act! Performativity of Korean Literature, held at The Ohio State University.

Public-facing scholarship is essential to her scholarship. In 2014 and 2015, she worked as a research assistant for the National Theatre Company of Korea’s Macbeth and King Lear productions. In 2017, she worked as a research assistant for Dr. Dani Snyder-Young for the Chicago-based A-Squared Theatre and Halcyon Theatre’s production of American Hwangap. From 2018 to 2019, during her field research in South Korea, she wrote numerous op-eds and essays in Korean newspapers and newsletters and gave a talk at the National Assembly calling for recognition of women’s contributions to Korean democratization movements. During this time, she also worked at the Ministry of Defense and at the Association of the Persons Wounded in the May 18 Democratization Movement, serving as a researcher in preparation for the launch of the May 18 Democratization Movement Truth Commission. After returning to the US, she has continued to publish in both Korean and English, with the aim of reaching multilingual readers. She also engages with local communities, speaking, for example, at the HANA Center, one of the largest Korean nonprofit community organizations in Chicago, where she shared her research on cultures of democracy in the Korean diaspora. In 2026, she was invited to lecture in the “Training Program for Specialists in the Interpretation and Use of May 18 Democratization Movement Records and Information” at the May 18 Democratization Movement Education Center in Kwangju, sharing her research with local experts and community members. Currently, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Korean American Arts Council (KAAC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in New York that produces performing arts festivals and cultural events across the United States rooted in the traditions of Korean culture.

Before coming to The Ohio State University, she taught at Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis, offering such courses as Asian American Theatre; Theatre and Performance in East Asia; Theater, Dance, & Digital Media in Contemporary Korea; and Asian Diaspora Theatre in departments and programs in theatre, East Asian languages and cultures, and the performing arts.

At The Ohio State University, she has taught courses such as Elements of Korean Culture; Korean Literature in Translation; Korean Dramatic Tradition; and Interdisciplinary Courses in Korean Art, Music, Film, and Theatre, while also offering her course “Performing Korean Diasporas” as part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) e-School CourseShare program.