Dillon Sung

Open to inquiries from prospective students.

Dillon Sung is a multimedia artist, memory worker, and community organizer based in Southern California. Through conversations with Transpacific Studies, Mad Studies, and political theory, Dillon’s doctoral research expounds on how historical state relations have determined the possibilities of movement, rights, and agency for migrants. Her dissertation project is a genealogical inquiry into instantiations of twentieth-century Korean stateless subjectivities, which draw on the militarization of madness during the Korean War, late-twentieth century U.S. and Korean human rights policies, and approaches to legal and narrative advocacy that have come to render subjects as legible. It also contributes to notions of Asian racialization by examining the juridical and historical linkages across the colonial Korean era, North Korean defectors in South Korea, and undocumented Koreans in the U.S.

Dillon informs and engages her embodied research with an art practice through discourses of social practice, performance theory, and creative writing. For her social practice work, she has been awarded a 2023-24 LAPP California Arts Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship, a 2023-24 Metabolic Studio Research and Writing Residency, and a 2020-21 Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellowship in collaboration with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Most recently, she was awarded the 2025-26 Russell Endowed Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the University of Southern California (USC) Graduate School. Dillon is a Ph.D. candidate and Provost Fellow in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC.

• BFA Fine Arts, __, 2015