Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the third of five children, was born on March 4, 1951 in Pusan, Korea, outside of Seoul. Because of the chaos of the Korean War, Cha’s family moved many times during the 1950s. After hostilities ceased, the family moved back to Seoul where Cha attended Ewha University Elementary School and Toksoo Elementary School.In 1962, the Cha family moved to Hawaii and, two years later, to North-ern California. Theresa and Elizabeth, her older sister, went to the Con-vent of the Sacred Heart School, an all-girls, Catholic school. Cha stud-ied briefly at the University of San Francisco before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her bachelor’s and mas-ter’s degrees in comparative literature under Bernard Augst and a Master of Fine Arts degree, studying with the performance artist, Jim Melchert. Cha spent 1976 in Paris doing postgraduate work in film-making and theory with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour and Thierry Kuntzel. She then returned to the Bay Area and continued the films and performances she had begun to gain recognition for as a graduate student.