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 (CEAPS). 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, sexual 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; and UMD's College of Arts and Humanities, 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.”

She co-edited a special double issue (with Dr. Timmy Chen), "A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia," for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and has collaborated on the Global Cinema collection of the Media History Digital Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She recently curated the screening series "Machines and Me: A Filmless Festival" as part of The Work of Self-Assembly in Global Asian Media and Art initiative, supported by the Arts for All program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) as well as a screening and conversation with Japanese filmmaker and journalist Shiori Itō about her film Black Box Diaries. Before joining the University of Illinois, Dr. Hé was an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Maryland, College Park, with affiliations in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute (AIM). She was previously a CCS Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and has also taught global and Asian film and media at the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of Oklahoma.