Haein Shim

Bio

Haein Shim is a purpose-driven activist, documentary producer, freelance journalist, and photojournalist, deeply committed to women’s rights and to pursuing truth through the power of visual storytelling rooted in social justice.

She has collaborated with numerous international media outlets, including TIME, The Economist, NPR, and Vice, and has published more than 50 articles worldwide. Leading global news platforms such as CNN, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera English have interviewed Shim on women’s rights issues in South Korea.

Currently, Shim is working as a documentary producer with an award-winning Austrian production team, focusing on global femicide across 12 countries. She has worked as an Undergraduate Researcher at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and as a researcher for the upcoming book Herlands: Lessons From Societies Where Women Make the Rules by Megha Mohan, the BBC’s first Gender and Identity Correspondent.

Shim graduated summa cum laude from Pasadena City College in 2023 and is currently pursuing her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where she was awarded the 2024–2025 Institute for Diversity in the Arts fellowship as a filmmaker and photographer.

She bridges her passion for social justice with visual storytelling in practice. Her photojournalism work has captured various international historical moments throughout her career, collaborating with local BIPOC women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ organizations including the largest women’s strike in Austria, an anti-femicide conference with DACH Vernetzungswochenende, the Feminist Perspectives Film Forum, and Pride Parade in Vienna. To Shim, the breadth of these projects reflects her dedication to understanding intersectionality within feminism.

She has been invited to work as an official photographer for several prestigious film festivals across Europe, including the Sarajevo Film Festival, International Cinematographers’ Film Festival Manaki Brothers, Drim Short Film Festival, and Ohrid Beach Film Festival. Through this work, she has had the privilege of photographing acclaimed actors Stellan Skarsgård and Willem Dafoe, as well as legendary cinematographers Darius Khondji and Wally Pfister. At Stanford, she has collaborated with university departments and various student organizations, photographing high-profile events featuring Hasan Minhaj, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Representative Ro Khanna through the Stanford Speakers Bureau.

Her feminist artwork “I’m Not a Doll, I’m a Person” was selected for the Hallyu! The Korean Wave exhibition and has been displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2023, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2024, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 2025, and is currently on display at the National Museum of Australia.

As an Executive Board Member of Communications for the National Women’s Political Caucus San Gabriel Valley from 2023 to 2024, she worked closely with state and national caucus leadership to support pro-choice women candidates, and was honored with the Women’s March Foundation’s Woman of the Year Award in 2024.

Beyond her professional achievements, Shim is a proud first-generation immigrant from Gwangju, South Korea, where she has developed a deep connection with survivors of the Gwangju Uprising and its living oral history. She is also the first woman in her family to pursue higher education, bringing a first-generation, low-income perspective that informs her commitment to equity and storytelling.