April 6, 2024
The CCS community is happy to announce recent graduate Juniper Kim ‘23, was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Award! Juniper will be pursuing a graphic novel project in Seoul, Korea, with her grant.
“While living in Seoul—a vibrant center of all kinds of arts and culture, and the place in which my family has roots—I will attempt to answer important questions about identity, art, and culture…” said Juniper.
The project’s current title is Gyopo’s Ballad. Juniper describes the work-in-progress as a “fictional graphic novel describing a Korean-born American-raised woman’s experience living in Korea for the first time since her emigration as a toddler. Sang, who is researching the Korean folk music revival, arrives in Seoul eager to reconnect with her roots; however, she also struggles to feel at home in her ‘home country’ and define herself somewhere in between being Korean and being American.”
“Juni is an incredible artist with vast skills in drawing, printmaking, and writing,” said co-founder and president of The Center for Cartoon Studies. “She is prolific in her work and I cannot wait to see their graphic novel published.”
More on Juniper’s graphic novel project, as described in her Fulbright application: “Drawing from my binational background and interdisciplinary training, Gyopo’s Ballad is informed by literary traditions such as the postmodern novel, visual traditions such as Western graphic memoir and Korean manhwa, and mixed-media techniques that approach books as a holistic, immersive experience. Like Sang, I am also a musician and scholar who approaches complex topics through the lens of art, visual or performed, traditional or popular, from East or West. “
An alum of nearby Dartmouth College, Juniper was nominated for an Ignatz Award for their self-published comic, KOREANS SING IN ENGLISH, in 2022. They were also awarded a MICE mini grant. Currently, Juniper is drawing a graphic novel called NEW KOREATOWN and working at a letterpress and bookbinding workshop where she teaches classes on comics, bookbinding, letterpress, and other book arts-related skills. When she’s not making print or visual art, Juniper plays the violin or viola, as well as runs her on own online shop, just to name a few.
See more of Juniper’s work here: twostringjuniper.com
About Fulbright: During their grants, Fulbrighters will meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Through engagement in the community, individuals will interact with their hosts on a one-to-one basis in an atmosphere of openness, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom, thereby promoting mutual understanding.
