Jeehey Kim's research encompasses the history of photography, visual culture, and film studies in East Asia. Kim's first book, Photography and Korea, is the first book on the history of Korean photography in English. She is currently working on a book project: Photography and Death: Funerary Photo-Portraiture in East Asia. She also has been writing articles on vernacular photographic practices as well as on documentary films and visual culture in relation to the Cold War and gender politics in East Asia.
As a curator, Kim has organized exhibitions such as the recent “Pyongyang Bookstore” at Seoul Metropolitan Library, which presented North Korean artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a dissertation on funerary portrait photography in East Asia. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.