KARIS HAEWON RYU | 류혜원 is a scholar, creative writer, and performing artist pursuing questions related to race, gender, religion, diaspora, empire, and indigeneity, particularly in Asian North American contexts. Her most recent research interrogates the racialization of Asian American bodies in juxtaposition to Puritan colonial space and place. She is interested in how Asian American, and broader considerations of Asian diasporic and Pacific, art challenges, complicates, and envisions life beyond and despite racial capitalism.

The first in her entire extended family to be born and raised on North American land, Karis’s life took a turn at the age of two when her father became a chaplain in the U.S. Army. She moved over ten times across North America and Asia before attending college. Her intellectual, artistic, and personal development can be attributed to these wide-ranging, complicated, and at many times perplexing life experiences. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been published or are forthcoming with literary magazines, academic journals, and artistic collaborations.

Karis will begin pursuing a Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Yale University in the fall of 2023. She holds an M.A. in Religion from Yale Divinity School and an A.B. in History and East Asian Studies from Brown University.