Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu

Field: Tibetan and Chinese Visual Culture
Advisor: Gray Tuttle and Ying Qian
Email: yl3452@columbia.edu

Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu is a PhD candidate on the History–East Asia track, specializing in Tibetan and Chinese visual culture and trained in comparative media studies. Her research spans Tibetan cultural production across traditional and contemporary art, photography, and film, with particular attention to the intersections of visual practices, media technologies, and social and religious life. She has written on topics including representations of Tibetan people in portrait photography, visual vocabularies and social contexts of contemporary art in Tibet, the indexicality of photographic technology in Tibetan cinema, and the intermediality of Tibetan Buddhist portraiture and photography.

Her dissertation, The Work of Images: Photography and Visual Culture on the Twentieth-Century Tibetan Plateau, traces cultures of image-making under the influence of photographic technology, situating photography within Tibetan Buddhist visual conventions and Chinese media cultures..

Before joining the doctoral program, Victoria received her BA in Art History from Barnard College and her MA in Tibetan Studies from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.