Lynette (Qiuyang 秋阳) Shen comes from Shanghai, China. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in Sinophone and Asian diasporic experimental films and video art. Her dissertation proposes to reconceive diaspora as a dynamic process enacted through image practices. Through the conceptual lens of what she calls “bad images”—low-resolution, glitched, and degraded forms—she argues that such images disrupt neoliberal regimes of visual governance and unsettle the hierarchies between original/copy and authentic/inauthentic that underwrites Chinese nationalist, patriarchal, and racialized models of diaspora. At a moment when visibility of diasporic and immigrant lives becomes weaponized, her project traces how diasporic image- makers reclaim opacity to resist being defined by origin, ethnic descent, and nationality.
Beyond research, Lynette has been working as an independent curator, film programmer, and maintained practice in film and photography. Her works have been supported by the Center of Experimental Ethnography and the Dissertation Research Award.