Karen Jiyun Sung is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Visual Storytelling and Applied Illustration at the Graphic Design department in the School of Design and Creative Arts. Her work spans illustration, graphic facilitation, comics, reportage illustration, and participatory storytelling. Due to her international upbringing, spanning the global South, East Asia, North America, and Europe, she is especially interested in exploring the concepts of self and in-between-ness across race, culture, ethnicity, nationality, and community.
Her research aims to use her extensive knowledge of visual communication and visualisation to explore the emotions and experiences that words alone cannot convey. She is especially interested in participatory and practice-based research, where hierarchies between participants and researchers are challenged. Her work has reached topics such as local and regional heritage, intergenerational connection, soft skills training, disaster prevention, and team cohesion within institutions.
As an active international illustrator, her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been recognised by the World Illustration Award (U.K.), the Japan Embassy in London, and the Society of Illustration West (U.S.). She primarily uses her graphic facilitation skills to visualise the ideas and discussions exchanged at conferences, talks, and academic articles. More recently, she has been developing a steady body of work that utilises immersive media such as Virtual Reality and multimodal storytelling to expand her modes of illumination.
Karen is interested in using drawing and participatory storytelling to explore a more humanistic approach to expanding knowledge in the areas of identity, belonging, and heritage. Her research interest stems from her discomfort with her own identifications; she felt her passport did not adequately represent her, yet options to express her true self were limited. Therefore, through her PhD, she collaborated with other Korean natives or diasporas to examine ways to combine drawing and symbolic communication as alternative methods for ‘showing’ self-identities rather than simply ‘telling’. Her PhD thesis is available in the Loughborough University repository, or here.
She has applied her expertise in participatory illustration and community co-creation to various funded projects across the UK and Europe. These include CErTiFY: Crisis and Employment: Tools and Methodologies For Your Future (Erasmus+), M.A.R.S Project: Methodological Approaches For Real Social Effects In Adult Education (Erasmus+), and the Impact Hub grant (Loughborough University). In 2023, she helped host the 11th International Digital Storytelling Conference in Loughborough. Finally, she has been working closely with the newly built DigiLabs at Loughborough University to utilise VR, hologram, and immersive media to expand research outputs and possibilities.
Karen actively participates in cross-institutional research groups such as the Illustration Educators Group, the Illustration Studies Group, and the Experimental Pedagogies Research Group. She has regularly presented her research at ICON: the Illustration Conference in the U.S. and the International Illustration Research Symposium.
Selected published articles:
- Sung, K.J., 2024. Sketch Circle: Using collective drawing to illuminate the personal identities of South Koreans. Journal of Illustration, 11(1), pp.69-87
- Sung, K.J., 2024. Making as Enquiring: Performing Making as a Means of Answering Research Questions. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 15(3), pp.147-165.
- Sung, K.J., 2026. ‘Adapting Storytelling for the busy workplace: #mynamemeans project’, in Storytelling Research Methods. London: Routledge.
Karen is a tutor on the BA Graphic Design and MA Graphic Design & Visualisation programmes in the School of Design and Creative Arts.
Her teaching interests focus on personal storytelling for design and creative processes, illustration for publication, urban sketching, graphic facilitation, and narrative sequences such as comics and graphic novels. She is also keen on helping students develop entrepreneurial opportunities and interdisciplinary approaches within visual communication, particularly emphasising the role of illustration for socially engaged applications and opportunities.
Karen has worked consistently with local and regional bodies to implement illustration for social engagement. Her collaborators include the All Saints Holy Trinity church, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, and the Heritage Group of Loughborough.
In addition, she strives to connect the academic thinking around illustration with practising illustrators. She has been invited to speak at events by the Association of Illustrators and the Tech Club at the University of the Arts London to speak about her interests and real-life applications.
- “The Stories Behind Storytelling” (2025), panel discussion, National Association of Writers in Education
- “Drawing Diversity: Visual Culture and Inclusive Practice” (2025), Association of Illustrators, Online Seminar Series.
- “Amplifying Participants’ Voices for Social Justice” (2025), University of the Arts London, London, UK
Karen welcomes interest from researchers and organisations for collaborative research projects and postgraduate supervision with interests particularly in inter/multi/trans-national identity and belongingness, creative participatory research methods, qualitative data collection through storytelling, and application of illustration in emerging media for both practice-based and full thesis PhD variants of study.