Mila Zuo is a scholar-practioner in film. She is interested in transnational Asian cinemas, film-philosophy, abject and enchanted epistemologies, star studies, digital and new media, de/anticolonial studies, and critical theories of gender/sexuality/race/ethnicity. She is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia.
Her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022) focuses on the affective racialization of Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways which vulgar, flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. Vulgar Beauty won the 2024 Outstanding Achievement best book award in media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Accompanying research can be found in Film-Philosophy, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Celebrity Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Feminist Media Histories, Canadian Literature, and in various anthologies.
In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo writes, directs, and produces narrative films, visual essays, documentaries, and music videos. Her short films have screened in international film festivals and universities, including Carnal Orient (2016) which premiered at Slamdance Film Festival, and her short narrative film Kin (2021), which was the recipient of the 2019 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship, and screened at HollyShorts Film Festival. Her current film project, Mongoloids, was awarded an Insight Development grant and Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Zuo also currently sits on the Film-Philosophy journal editorial board and is a 2025 Killam Research Fellow.
At UBC, Zuo is affiliate faculty in the Asian Canadian and Migration program, and she is part of the research cluster, Cinema Thinks the World.
