Belinda Qian He

Belinda Qian He is an assistant professor in East Asian and Cinema & Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in cinema and media studies (CMS) from the University of Washington, Seattle. Before joining the ARHU-SLLC faculty at UMD, she worked as a CCS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and taught in the Department of Film and Media studies at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Washington Seattle. 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 atrocity, witnessing, sexual violence and trauma. 

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and edited volumes, including The Child in World Cinema (Lexington Books, 2018), Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization (HKU Press, 2022), and Global Movie Magazine Networks (UC Press, 2024). Her in-progress book project Expose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in Chinese Revolutionary Times has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) & Library of Congress, Asia Art Archive, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, among others.

Dr. He co-edited a special double issue titled "A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia" for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. As a collaborator since 2020, she has contributed to the Global/Chinese Cinema collection of the Media History Digital Library at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her engagement spans academia, media industry, and the art world, extending to experimental film production and curatorial responsibilities for film festivals, archives, and digital humanities projects. One of the most recent film screening events she organized, Machines and Me: A Filmless Festival 2024 Screening Series (see below), is part of the initiative Machines & Me: The Work of Self-Assembly in Global Chinese Art and Media. This project showcases a diverse range of films and media artworks that cross formal and conceptual boundaries, exploring how machines—cameras, computers, cyborgs, cellphones, AI, policing systems, surveillance, structural violence, and the mechanisms shaping our material and institutional survival—define ways of being, thinking, and acting within global Asian and Sinophone contexts.

Part One: Short Film Screening I – Where Truth Lies

Part Two: Special Screening – A Filmless Festival (dir. Wo Wang, 2015) + Q&A with the Director  

Part Three: Short Film Screening II – Compound Eyes of the Machinic

Part Four: Virtual Roundtable + Q&A, featuring artist talks by Ellen Chang, Zike He, Rui An Ho, and Guangli Liu.