Hera Kang

Hera Kang is an artist and creative technologist working between theatre and technology. She develops her understanding of machine perception through pipeline building and research within the commercial creative tech industry, then carries that thinking into the realm of avant-garde theatre — guided by the belief that theatre can serve as a cognitive interface, a time and space to actually exist. She is a recipient of the California Institute of the Arts Merit Scholarship, and her collaborative work has received the Mnet Asian Music Awards for Best Music Video (2024) and an iF Design Award (2026). She has taught 3D graphics and generative AI at Fast Campus and Seoul National University Library.

Education

  • MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, US
  • BAS, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea

Awards

  • 2026 iF Design Awards, d'strict Korea, Interior Architecture
  • 2024 Mnet Asian Music Awards, Best Music Video
  • 2024 California Institute of the Arts, Merit Scholarship
  • 2023 Sogang University Convergence Technology Award

Freelance

  • 2024 AI VFX Artist, Aespa, Armageddon, Rigend Film, SM Entertainment, Seoul, Korea
  • 2024 MV Director, Youra, Worm in the Apple, Stone Music Entertainment, Seoul, Korea
  • 2022 3D / AR Designer, Heights, Seoul, Korea
  • 2020 VR MV Director, Textures Mix 005, Textures Seoul, Seoul, Korea
  • 2019 Projection Designer, Korea National University of Arts, Seoul, Korea

Employment

  • 2026– AI Pipeline Engineer, Technical Artist, Zerospace, Brooklyn, US — Builds video pipelines for AI production: vision-language + segmentation masking, refgen (swapping a new product into a reference ad video while preserving its camera work and edit rhythm), an AI video production review pipeline (Gaussian Splat scene capture paired with generative video, with asset lineage tracing every render back to the plates, references, prompts, seeds, and models it was made from), and hdr-forensics (pixel-level verification of whether a render's HDR is genuine or upcast SDR).
  • 2023–24 3D Designer, d'strict Korea Inc, Seoul, Korea — Led AI visual development and built interactive 3D prototypes for Arte Kid's Park attractions in Unity, Cinema 4D, and Stable Diffusion.
  • 2023 Industry-Academia Research Lead, LG Electronics, Seoul, Korea — Proposed a UX prototype for the file-sorting ML function, adopted as a default feature in the gram Link app for the 24" LG gram Pro series; also an ML-based 3D visualization tool built on LG's EXAONE foundation model.

Projects

  • 2026 Particle Theory, California Institute of the Arts, CA, US
  • 2025 Volver, Walt Disney Modular Theater, California Institute of the Arts, CA, US
  • 2025 What you believe is where you are, California Institute of the Arts, LA, US
  • 2023 Miss Hwang will ALWAYS be there, HCI Korea, Gangwon, Korea
  • 2023 OutVenture, In-Vehicle Education Service, AI Capstone, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea
  • 2019 Twentysip VR, Art & Technology Conference, Hanghwatang, Seoul, Korea

Teaching

  • 2024 Lecturer, Stable Diffusion (ComfyUI) × Blender for 3D Motion Graphics, Fast Campus, Seoul, Korea — Designed the curriculum and produced a full online lecture series on generative AI for motion design, teaching diffusion model pipelines to a mixed cohort of designers and engineering students during the early adoption phase of ComfyUI. Covered node-based inference workflow construction end to end: ControlNet conditioning, IPAdapter reference-image control, AnimateDiff temporal consistency, model checkpointing, sampler and latent-space parameter tuning, and custom node authoring — connecting traditional 3D motion graphics in Blender to text-to-image and image-to-video generation. Framed technique inside enduring principles of the ML-based creative process, multimodality, and directions for future application.
  • 2024 Lecturer, 3D × AI for Designers, Seoul National University Library, Seoul, Korea — Lectured on applied generative AI and 3D toolchains for a cross-disciplinary audience of designers and researchers.