is a writer and cultural worker who explores intergenerational trauma, grief, and healing.

She researches and produces traditional and contemporary rituals to transmute han (한)—a Korean word for the embodied experience of accumulated grief and rage resulting from historical violence. She is specifically interested in modalities that alleviate han through a kind of joyful catharsis Koreans refer to as heung, as well as the deep and loving web of kinship, responsibility, and care known as jeong.

With the support of the Soros Equality Fellowship, Jungwon is currently developing an event series that explores the cross-cultural resonance of han in collaboration with artists and cultural practitioners whose families have suffered the direct impacts of historical violence. The project, called Unbind Your Heart, recognizes grief as a portal to solidarity. It uplifts music, movement, art, ceremony, food, and togetherness as potent ancestral tools that can help us liberate ourselves from the dangerous manifestations of unresolved generational trauma. They also exemplify communal creativity as prayer and practice for the collective future so many of us yearn for.

Unbind Your Heart is also a historical intervention grounded in the act of mutual witnessing. For people born into lineages shaped by colonialism, imperialism, and planetary destruction, the insistent presence of han in our bodies contests widespread and relentless efforts to erase our histories. This body of work posits that that han, properly honored and transmuted, can nurture global solidarities and seed narrative justice. It is a portal to the possibility that ancestral healing contributes to deep and lasting social transformation by connecting our distinct pasts to a shared future.