Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an artist and writer born in 1951 in Pusan, South Korea. Over a ten-year period in the 1970s, she received four degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1976 studied at the Centre d’Etudes Americaine du Cinéma in Paris. Cha was awarded an artist’s residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, taught video art at Elizabeth Seton College and worked in the design department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1980 until her death in 1982, she was an editor and writer at Tanam Press in New York. Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her work has been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum; Artists Space, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, among other venues. Her book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender. A major retrospective exhibition of her work, entitled The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) was organized by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2001, and traveled to five cities, including Seoul, Korea.