Bio
Karen Fang is a film scholar and visual culture critic whose writing explores the often-overlooked makers and histories behind the literary and visual narratives shaping our world. Her most recent book, Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong (Rutgers University Press 2025) tells the story of the pioneering Chinese immigrant artist, centenarian, and Disney Legend who left an indelible mark across American visual heritage. Best known today for his instrumental role in the making of Bambi, Wong also graced Warner Bros., Hallmark, Readers Digest, and beyond. Drawing on deep archival research from the Academy of Motion Pictures to U.S. Customs and Immigration and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Background Artist has been praised as “the definitive biography” (Smithsonian Magazine) and “a worthy tribute to a pathbreaking artist” (Publishers Weekly). It was named Honorable Mention in the 2025 Chinese American Librarians Award Best Book Award for Adult Nonfiction.
Also demonstrating her discipline- and area-pushing interests in race, representation, and transcultural aesthetics, Karen’s previous book was Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film (Stanford University Press 2017). Exploring freedom, control, capitalism, privacy and artistic agency in one of the world’s most dynamic cinemas, Arresting Cinema appeared on the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s transition from British colonial to Chinese Communist rule.
A frequent advisor for museums, film festivals, cultural and community organizations, Karen believes ardently in arts’ power for fostering human connection and understanding. With the nationally broadcast public radio series, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, Karen focuses exclusively on the arts and humanities. Her short, widely circulated, and frequently rebroadcast stories expand that well-known program’s focus on science and technology stories by transforming our assumptions about the founding figures and forms of innovation. Many of her episodes also feature women, persons of color, or other marginalized media and groups. By documenting a new history of creativity, Karen’s radio stories also help us reimagine our future.
At the University of Houston, Karen is Professor of English and founder and chair of the Media & Moving Image (MMI) initiative. Believing the journey is as meaningful as the final product and that a joke poem or a personal cartoon can carry as much significance as a public sculpture or an Old Master painting, Karen strives to nurture individual interests, ideas, professional and creative goals. Under her leadership, MMI’s annual student prize competition celebrates the diversity of media-related work on the UH campus. It also amplifies students’ professional ambitions by bringing their work before a diverse range of industry experts.
Karen’s writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Winterthur Museum, the Community of Writers and the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies. She is a longtime committee member of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and advised on two documentaries regarding Asian American history.
A mother, a daughter of immigrants, and a lifelong Sunday painter, Karen’s work is rooted in conviction that art and storytelling remain among the most vital tools we have for fostering empathy, civic awareness, and lasting cultural change.