Mila Zuo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC, as well as the Graduate Advisor for the Cinema & Media Studies graduate programs. Her research areas include transnational Asian cinemas; film-philosophy; abject and enchanted epistemologies; star studies; digital and new media; and critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity.

Her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022) focuses on the affective racialization of Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways which vulgar, flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. It won the 2024 Outstanding Achievement best book award in media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Accompanying research can be found in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Celebrity Studies Journal, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Feminist Media Histories journal, and in various anthologies on contemporary cinema and media studies. 

In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo writes, directs, and produces narrative films, visual essays, documentaries, and music videos. Her award-winning short films have screened in international film festivals and universities, including Carnal Orient (2016) which premiered at Slamdance Film Festival, and her short narrative film Kin (2021), which was the recipient of the 2019 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship, and screened at HollyShorts Film Festival. She is currently working on her first feature, Mongoloids, a hybrid docu-fiction project about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its impacts across generations. This research creation work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Insight Development Grant.

Zuo currently sits on the editorial board of Film-Philosophy journal and is a 2025 Killam Research Fellowship awardee.