Feng-Mei Heberer

Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies. She is also a faculty affiliate of the department’s Asian Film and Media Initiative. Her research interests lie at the junctures of labor, transnational migration, and Asian diaspora, and her work draws heavily on the insights of ethnic studies, queer studies, feminist studies, and critical area studies. In addition, she researches and works in film curation and community arts and culture organizing.

Heberer is the author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). The book explores a multilingual archive of contemporary queer and feminist videos by Asian diasporans in North America, Europe, and East Asia. It grapples with the pressing question how media representation can critique and advance social justice for racialized minorities in the wake of today’s unprecedented rise of onscreen diversity. Other writings have appeared in Sexualities, Camera Obscura, The Autobiographical Turn in German Documentary and Experimental Film, and Asian Video Cultures, among others.

Heberer joins NYU from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Global Studies and Languages. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California and holds an MA from the Free University Berlin. In addition, she studied film in France and China on fellowships from the German National Academic Foundation.