Jun Okada

Associate Professor, School of Film, Television, and Media Arts

Jun Okada Headshot

Full-Time

At Emerson since 2020

Contact

Campus

Boston

Department

Film, Television, and Media Arts

Areas of Expertise

Programs

Education

  • B.A., University of California, Berkeley
  • M.A., University of California, Los Angeles
  • Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Jun Okada’s areas of interest and expertise include media histories, media theories, Asian American film and video, and avant-garde and experimental media.

She has published peer-reviewed essays in Journal of Film and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Film Quarterly, and others. Other works include her book-length monograph Making Asian American Film and Video: Histories, Institutions, Movements (Rutgers UP 2015).

Among Dr. Okada’s awards and honors is a 2019 Fulbright Scholar Award for Teaching and Research in the Performing/Visual Arts at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema — Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa in Portugal, and a 2018 UCLA Department of Cinema and Media Studies Alumna of the Year Award.

Courses
  • Seminar in Media Arts Topics
  • Media Histories
  • MFA Thesis Project
  • Topics in Visual and Media Arts: Studies
  • Media Criticism and Theory
  • History of Experimental/Avant-garde
  • Approaches in Media Studies
Academic Work
  • Forthcoming, “Affective Labor and Interracial Female Friendship in Season One: Belinda and Paula,” in Neoliberal Entanglements in HBO's The White Lotus (Seasons 1-2)
  • 2025, “Environmental Presence: An Ecocritical View of the Japanese American Incarceration Film,” in Emerging from the Rubble: Asian/American Writings on Disasters, Y. Kase & E. Kosaka (Eds.), Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press
  • 2020, “Asian American Independent Film,” in Race and Media: Critical Approaches, L.K. Lopez (Ed.), NYU Press
  • 2020, “Representation, Recognition and the Possibility of a Radically Transformed Future: Renee Tajima-Peña’s Asian Americans (2020),” Film Quarterly, Vol 74, No 1
  • 2019, “Fakin da Funk (1997) and Gook (2017): Exploring Black/Asian Relations in the Asian American ‘hood Film,” Hollywood at the Intersection of Identity, D. Konzett (Ed.), Rutgers University Press
  • 2018, “Hara Kazuo and Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974),” Exploiting East Asian Cinemas, K. Provencher and M. Dillon (Eds.), Bloomsbury Academic
  • 2017, “Nam June Paik and Laurel Nakadate at the Margins of Asian American Film and Video.” IN FOCUS: Asian American Film and Media. B. Hu and V.N. Pham (Eds.) Cinema Journal 56, no. 3: 136-141
  • 2015, Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, and Movements, Rutgers University Press