Professor Lee teaches and researches cinema studies at the Department of Visual Studies, Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He holds a Ph.D. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Cinema Studies and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA).

Professor Lee is a historian of Asian cinema whose interests span the Cultural Cold War, South Korean cinema and popular culture, international film festivals, and the film industries in contemporary Asia. He has extensively investigated film history in its socio-historical and industrial contexts, paying particular attention to issues of the national and the transnational, questions of ownership and control, the new regionalism, industrial networks, and the unprecedented cultural flows and mixing in cinema and media around Asia and the globe. Professor Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network and the editor of Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media and Rediscovering Korean Cinema. He is currently completing a new monograph Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema's Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas while co-editing The South Korean Film Industry, Asian Cinema and the Cultural Cold War, and Routledge Companion to Asian Cinema.

Professor Lee is the recipient of the Jay Leyda Award for Academic Excellence and the David H. Culbert Prize for the Best Article in Film and Media History. His works have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. Prior to joining Lingnan University, he was an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University and assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was also a visiting professor at the Australian National University, Dankook University, and Yonsei University. Professor Lee is also a founding director of Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab), a virtual film studies initiative.

South Korean cinema and popular culture, Cultural Cold War, international film festivals, and the film industries in contemporary Asia