Coleen Baik is a Korean American artist and writer based in NYC. Her practice centers around experimental animation, painting, and the essay. She explores themes of absence, longing, memory, and myth. Coleen is influenced by visual traditions in Korean folk art and shamanic artifacts, as well as auditory-visual synesthesia. She eschews traditional 2D formulas and stylistic trends, preferring to work in wordless non-linear impressions. Her work has been described as “mysterious, with a sense of meaning and significance that’s difficult to pin down.” Her films have screened at BAM New York, and in domestic and international festivals such as Brooklyn Film Festival; American Documentary and Animation Film Festival; Linoleum; and Thessaloniki. She writes about creative process biweekly on the-line-between.com. Her essays have appeared in serials like Roxane Gay’s The Audacity. She’s a 2025 Periplus Fellow in prose and a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in film. She’s a finalist for the 2025 Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Gold Fellowship. She has no formal training in the visual arts or creative writing.
While at MacDowell, Baik worked on her next animated short film. She worked in graphite on paper, shooting each drawing by camera, frame by frame. Baik presented her work, past and in-progress, to the Peterborough community at MacDowell Downtown.
