Dr. Yoon has more than 20 years of experience in media literacy, intercultural communication, children and media, Korean culture, and teacher education. Her work has taken place across various educational settings, including public and private schools, alternative education settings, universities, and teacher education programmes in South Korea and the United States.
Born and raised in South Korea until ninth grade, she spent her early childhood immersed in Korean family values, traditions, and everyday practices of care. During her teenage years, her family moved to Thailand — an experience that placed her, at a formative age, at the crossroads of different cultures, languages, and ways of life, including occasional visits to neighbouring Malaysia. Living across cultures during these years taught her that culture is not simply a set of customs, but a living lens through which we experience family, learning, belonging, and care.
She later returned to South Korea for university before continuing her graduate studies in the United States, earning her master’s degree from New York University and her Ph.D. from Temple University in Philadelphia. Her passion for understanding how people communicate, learn, and connect across cultures led her to build a distinguished career in communication and media studies. She went on to earn tenure at Roosevelt University in Chicago, reflecting years of dedication to university teaching, research, and academic contribution. After many years in this role, she chose to step away from her tenured position to make more room for independent scholarship, public writing, and creative projects that connect research with everyday life. Today, Dr. Yoon continues her work as a Fellow Scholar at the Media Education Lab.
Her current writing explores the layered nature of Korean culture. Rather than presenting Korea as a single, simple story, she examines how longstanding traditions, rapid modernisation, family values, collective memory, and global media continue to shape Korean society today. Through her newsletter and podcast at yoonjiwon.substack.com, she invites international audiences to look beyond trends and stereotypes and discover the deeper cultural ideas beneath them.
Created for Malaysia’s multicultural families, her approach presents Taegyo in a way that feels welcoming, relevant, and achievable for parents from different cultural backgrounds. Her hope is beautifully simple: that families will learn to appreciate the quiet, everyday moments of pregnancy — because it is through these gentle moments of care, connection, and love that a family begins to grow.
