Kim J.Y. Han (she/her/hers) is a South Korean writer-director who uses narrative as a vehicle for activism and societal change. With her stories, she challenges flawed systemic power structures while centering marginalized characters. In 2025, Han won the CJ & TIFF K-Story Fund Fellowship and placed as a Finalist for the 2025 Inaugural Sundance Collab Cultural Impact Residency and the WIF/Black List Episodic Lab. Her debut short film, CHAMPION, screened at thirty Oscar-qualifying and global festivals including Hawai’i IFF, Tokyo Children’s IFF, Busan Kids and Youth IFF, and more, and can be seen on Omeleto in Spring 2025. Han is developing various other feature and TV projects while preparing to shoot her next short film, MOTTAINAI.

Prior to fully transitioning into a writer-director, Han worked in Hollywood for eight years, where she was most recently a TV development executive at NBCUniversal International Studios. She helped oversee the development of the Golden Globe-nominated series, THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, while specializing in packaging global-facing shows from Asia and Africa. Han also participated in NALIP Latino Lens Incubator as a producer and Film Independent Project Involve as a creative executive fellow, producing three short films that won the top jury awards at festivals like Berlinale and SXSW. In 2019, Colour Entertainment selected her in their 1st Annual Next Up List, as one of the most hardworking individuals to watch in entertainment.

Raised in Seoul and San Francisco, Han graduated from the University of Chicago with a dual degree in International Studies and Cinema Studies. Beyond screenwriting, Han likes to bake, paint, and dabble in her first science fiction novel.