Belinda Qian He

Belinda Qian He is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is affiliated with the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Institute of Communications Research in the College of Media. Dr. Hé's work lies at the intersection of film/media studies, art history, and legal humanities, exploring the role of film, photography, video, and emerging media in policing, punishing, and justice-making. She pays specific attention to the history of East Asian and global cinema, exhibitions, and participatory media, associated with labor, forensics, atrocity, witnessing, violence and trauma. 

Her work has appeared in journals such as Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, The China Review, Film Art, and edited volumes, including The Child in World Cinema (Lexington Books, 2018), Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization (HKU Press, 2022), Global Movie Magazine Networks (UC Press, 2024; winner of 2026 Best Edited Collection Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies), and Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Humanities (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025). Her in-progress book project Expose and Punish: Cinema and Incriminating Media in an Age of Endless Reckoning has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) & Library of Congress; Asia Art Archive and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Programme; Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange; Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities; UMD's College of Arts and Humanities and Arts for All Program, and Illinois Campus Board, among others. A second project, Proofing Herself: Evidence, Labor, and the Archival Life of Sexual Violence, traces a media history of zheng (proof, evidence, witnessing, certification, vindication) to examine how women survivors of sexual violence in global Chinese and East Asian contexts use auto-archival practices to document harm and seek redress in the face of structural legal failures. Ongoing research and curatorial work also include “Table-screens, Archives, and Desktops as Trialscapes”; “Planting Cinema: Between Field and Table—Working in/with the Wild”; and a research/course development project titled “A.I. Acts: Chinese Machines, Asian Intelligence, Global Media.”