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, Revolutionary Women of the Kwangju Uprising: Performance, Democracy, and the Power of Mourning in South Korea. 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 where deaths disavowed by the state and concealed from the public eye emerge into communal memories.

Her publications have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, and in edited collections published with the Cambridge University Press, Chonnam National University (in Korean), among others. Her research has also been recognized with awards, fellowships, and workshops from the Mellon/Social Science Research Council, Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies,  Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University, and the University of Iowa’s Korean Studies Research Network, funded by the Korea Foundation. Other awards include the International Federation for Theatre Research’s Helsinki Prize, Association for Theatre in Higher Education/Association for Asian Performance’s Emerging Scholars Award, and Association for Theatre in Higher Education/Performance Studies Focus Group’s Emerging Scholars Award. Currently, she is the Vice President/AAP Conference Planner for Association of Asian Performance (2025-27).

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 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, giving a talk at the National Assembly, calling for the recognition of women’s contribution to Korean democracy. 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 launching of the May 18 Democratization Movement Truth Commission. After returning to the US, she continues to publish both in Korean and in English, intending that her work reaches multilingual readers. She also engages with local communities, speaking, for example, at the HANA Center, one of the largest Korean non-profit community organizations in Chicago, sharing her research on cultures of democracy in the Korean diaspora. 

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; Asian Diaspora Theatre, in the Department of Theatre, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Performing Arts Department. 

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