Haein Shim

Bio

Haein Shim is an activist, documentary producer, journalist, and photojournalist, dedicated to women’s rights and to pursuing truth and social justice through the power of visual storytelling.

Her over 50 published bylines have appeared in numerous international media outlets including TIME, The Economist, NPR, and Vice. Shim has also appeared to provide expert commentary on women’s rights issues in South Korea on global news platforms such as CNN, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera English. Her story as a feminist activist challenging beauty standards can be found in journalist Elise Hu’s book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital. 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, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and in its current display at the National Museum of Australia.

In 2023, she was a guest lecturer in a webinar at GADIP (Gender and Development in Practice) in Sweden titled “Gender in South Korea: Antifeminist Backlash and the Recent Rise of Feminist Politics of Refusal.” In 2024, she was invited to speak at Guerrilla in South Korea, where her lecture centered on the importance of women’s higher education. She was an Executive Board Member of Communications for the National Women’s Political Caucus San Gabriel Valley from 2023 to 2024, and was honored with the Women’s March Foundation’s Woman of the Year Award in 2024.

As a photojournalist, she has covered the largest women’s strike in Austria, an anti-femicide conference with DACH Vernetzungswochenende, the Feminist Perspectives Film Forum, and Pride Parade in Vienna. She has worked as an official photographer for film festivals including the Sarajevo Film Festival, International Cinematographers’ Film Festival Manaki Brothers, Drim Short Film Festival, and Ohrid Beach Film Festival, photographing actors Stellan Skarsgård and Willem Dafoe, and cinematographers Darius Khondji and Wally Pfister. At Stanford, she has photographed high-profile events featuring comedian Hasan Minhaj, Senator Bernie Sanders, author Melissa Febos, and Representative Ro Khanna.

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.

Shim is a proud first-generation immigrant from Gwangju, South Korea, deeply connected to the survivors of the Gwangju Uprising. She is the first woman in her family to pursue higher education.