Production design sits at the point where a script becomes a physical world, and Hayeon Kim has built her career on that threshold. She began as a production designer in South Korea, where her first feature, the 81-minute musical Homeless Kwon Jenny, won Best International Feature Film at the NOVA Festival and the Audience Choice Award at the Seattle Film Festival. She then completed her MFA at the American Film Institute Conservatory, where the 35mm short Crianza, which she designed with production support from Kodak and Panavision, won Best Cinematography at the Toronto International Women Film Festival.
This year she served as Art Director and Set Designer on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ official nominee interview series with Amelia Dimoldenberg for the 98th Academy Awards, distributed on the Oscars’ official YouTube channel. Her practice now extends beyond film into spatial design for immersive and themed environments. In this conversation with Grit Daily, she discusses how she builds worlds for the camera and for audiences who walk through them.
You began your feature film career in South Korea, where Homeless Kwon Jenny, an 81-minute Korean-language musical you designed, went on to win Best International Feature Film at the NOVA Festival and the Audience Choice Award at the Seattle Film Festival before streaming across major Korean platforms including Watcha and Wavve. What drew you to production design as a storytelling discipline, and how did that first feature shape your visual instincts?
I wasn’t the kid who grew up loving movies. What I loved were books, especially plays and drama collections. In my early twenties, that led me into a theater club, where I started designing sets for stage productions. It was the first time I understood that space could carry emotion, that a wall or a chair on stage could hold meaning.
After finishing my fine art degree in South Korea, I realized I was drawn less to making objects and more to shaping space and collaborating with other people. So I enrolled in an interior design certificate program, thinking I’d work as an interior designer.
While I was in that program, a musical theater director I knew was adapting one of her scripts into a feature film. In a way, the project found both of us at the same time. She had the story and the music, and I had been searching for exactly this kind of space to design. I read the script, listened to the music she had written, and I just fell in love. It felt like everything I had been circling around, the theater instinct, the fine art eye, the spatial thinking from interior design, could finally meet on one project.
That film became Homeless Kwon Jenny. I designed the sets by pulling from every discipline I had trained in. And something unexpected happened during production: the head of one of Korea’s established set construction companies, ArtTrade, chose to provide the physical set builds as an in-kind contribution to the film. That kind of support is very rare on an independent Korean production, and it gave me the confidence that the design work was reaching people.
Looking back, that first feature shaped my instincts in one specific way: I began treating the set as another character in the story, one that holds memory and emotion the way the actors do.
Homeless Kwon Jenny attracted an unusual form of industry backing. ArtTrade Co., Ltd., one of South Korea’s major film set construction companies, provided in-kind set construction at no cost to the production after its CEO reviewed your design work. What does that kind of peer investment mean for an independent film, and how did it change what was possible on screen?
For an independent Korean film, that kind of peer investment is genuinely rare. Set construction is usually one of the largest line items in a production budget, and on an independent project, the design ambition often gets scaled back before anything is even built. When ArtTrade decided to provide the set builds as an in-kind contribution, it changed the fundamental math of what we could put on screen.
Practically, it meant we could design and build environments at a scale the original budget wouldn’t have supported: full standing sets with proper construction quality, real materials, real dimensions. Instead of suggesting a world through fragments, we were able to build spaces the actors could actually live inside. For a musical, where the camera moves with the music and the performers need room to breathe, that mattered enormously. The set stopped being a constraint and became something the story could unfold within.
Working with the head of ArtTrade also shaped how I think about the profession itself. I was early in my film career at the time, and watching how a veteran set construction team approached materials, execution, and finishing gave me a professional vocabulary I couldn’t have built any other way. What stayed with me most, though, was that he treated me as a production designer from day one, not as someone still proving it. That kind of respect from an established figure in the Korean film industry is something I still carry into every project I take on.
After that festival run, you completed your MFA at the American Film Institute Conservatory. How did formal training at AFI build on the instincts you had already developed working professionally in Korea, and what changed in how you approach a script?
Working on Homeless Kwon Jenny in South Korea taught me how the Korean film industry actually operates on the ground. Collaborating with ArtTrade, working alongside the Korean art crew we assembled, and observing how other Production Designers structured their own art teams, I learned firsthand how set construction, vendor relationships, and art department hierarchies function within that ecosystem, a lot of it through direct observation while working and my own research on the side.
AFI expanded that foundation into a completely different industry. The first, and probably biggest, thing the program gave me was a deep working understanding of how the American film industry, and specifically Hollywood, is structured. How the art department is organized here, how it differs from Korea, which vendors to go to for which kinds of work, how the workflow moves from concept through construction to shooting. Between the coursework and actually making my own films at AFI, I absorbed a huge amount of practical knowledge very quickly. That kind of industry fluency is hard to build from the outside, and I’m grateful I got to build it inside the program.
The second thing that changed how I approach a script was learning to design a visual flow across an entire film. Not designing scenes in isolation, but building a visual language and iconography that follows the character’s and story’s arc — so the world visually evolves as the character does. AFI walked me through that process in real depth: how to choose shapes, palettes, and motifs that carry emotional meaning across a film, and how to actually execute that intention on a working set. Being taught that so carefully, and then getting to practice it under supervision, was an incredibly rare kind of learning.
And the last thing, which might be the most important, is collaboration. AFI is an intense program: a small group of people, working in tight spaces, under real time, budget, and resource constraints. You learn how to make something out of very little, with very different kinds of people, again and again. That’s the skill that carries into every professional set I’ve worked on since. Design is only half of what a production designer does. The other half is knowing how to lead, translate vision into space, and build trust.
Your AFI short Crianza, a two-minute silent narrative shot on 35mm with support from Kodak and Panavision, recently won Best Cinematography at the Toronto International Women Film Festival. The film asks the design to move between two worlds, a working Spanish winery and its cellar, in only two minutes of screen time. How do you design for both inside such a compressed format?
Traditional Spanish wine cellars are typically underground, and I researched that carefully. Cave districts in La Rioja, family cellars dug into hillsides, whole villages built above networks of subterranean bodegas. Temperature stability is the practical reason, but the underground tradition is also cultural: cellars have historically been places for making wine, gathering, and family life all at once.
I made a deliberate choice to break from that tradition. I built this cellar above ground, with a window that lets sunlight into the room. Because in this story, the space isn’t only functioning as a working cellar. It’s also functioning as a memory tunnel. The mother is looking back on the years of raising her daughter and the years of aging the wine, and the two journeys unfold in the same room at the same time. A dark underground cellar couldn’t hold that. I needed warm daylight moving across the wood, across the barrels, across the mother’s face, because memory itself is a kind of warm light. So the space had to breathe with it.
That’s probably why the cellar reads as intimate. The warmth of the wood, the sunlight, the sense that this is a room where a family’s memory lives, all of that was the point of the design.
From my perspective, the winery and the cellar were never separate worlds. They share the same emotional metabolism. Wine ferments over years. A child grows over years. Both require slow, patient care from the same pair of hands. Once I understood the film through that lens, the design followed naturally. I was looking for the one visual language that could hold both.
Working on 35mm with Kodak and Panavision also raised the stakes in a productive way. Film stock rewards texture and warmth in a way digital doesn’t quite replicate, and knowing that shaped every material choice. When you’re designing for two minutes of screen time, every surface has to earn its place. There’s no room for anything decorative, since everything has to carry meaning.
This year you served as Art Director and Set Designer on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ official interview series with Amelia Dimoldenberg, featuring nominees from the 98th Academy Awards, which has drawn more than eight million views on the Oscars’ official YouTube channel. What is different about designing a physical environment that becomes part of the Academy’s visual identity during awards season?
This was my first time designing an interview set of this scale, and my first time collaborating with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kelly Fallon was the Production Designer on the project, and she made beautiful choices that carried this year’s Academy Awards design theme into the room. My work as Set Designer and Art Director was to translate those choices into the physical build, meaning the drafting and the coordination with prop houses and construction, so the space felt cohesive on camera.
What struck me immediately was the awareness that this room would exist as part of the Academy’s visual identity during awards season. The set had to hold up across multiple shoots as a recurring backdrop that viewers would associate with the Oscars themselves. That raised the bar on every layout decision, from the drafting of the walls to the screening wall details the camera would see.
Alongside film, your practice now extends into spatial design for immersive and themed environments, where an audience walks through the work itself. What changes in your process when the viewer is inside the space, and what habits from film design carry over?
The biggest shift is time and viewpoint. In film, you’re designing for a camera that moves through space along a specific path. The audience only ever sees what the lens frames, and only for as long as the cut allows. In spatial design for themed environments, the audience becomes the camera. They choose where to look, how long to linger, whether to turn around and walk back. Every angle has to hold up because every angle will be seen.
That reality reshapes the whole decision-making process behind the design. In film, a wall reads correctly under a specific lighting setup for a specific shot. In a walk-through space, that same wall has to hold up to a viewer standing six inches from it at any time of day, which means every material and finishing choice is weighed against a very different set of conditions from the start.
Sequencing gets rethought too. In film, editing controls the sequence, and the cuts decide what the audience sees next. In a spatial environment, the layout itself becomes the edit. The way one space opens into another, the sightlines from one threshold to the next, the pacing between reveal and rest, all of that has to live inside the physical design, because there’s no cut to lean on.
What carries over from film is the instinct that every surface has to carry meaning and story. Film discipline teaches you that if an object is on screen, it’s telling the audience something about the character and the story. That same rigor applies in spatial design. Every threshold, every material transition, every visual detail has to earn its place in the story the space is telling.
You describe your work as exploring the intersection of story and space. For early-career production designers trying to build a career that spans film, digital media, and experiential formats, what skills beyond visual talent have proven most essential?
Beyond visual talent, the skill that’s carried me the furthest has been research. And I mean research in a deeper sense than just gathering references. Every project, whether it’s a Korean feature, a family-run Spanish winery, or a themed environment, begins with the same question: What is the real world this story or space is asking me to build?
For Homeless Kwon Jenny, that meant understanding how Korean set construction and art department structures actually work, most of it through direct observation and my own reading on the side. For Crianza, it meant researching family winemaking in Spain, the architecture of underground cellars, and the sensory life of a small village, and then knowing where to break from that research when the story asked for something else. In themed environments, the same instinct carries over: a space only means something once you understand the world it belongs to.
The other skill that matters is collaboration, but in a very specific form: the ability to translate across different professional languages. Collaborators rarely share a vocabulary, a timeline, or a set of priorities. Being able to sit in each of those rooms and translate design intent into terms that the team can act on is a skill that’s taken me a long time to build, and one I’m still building.
Visual talent gets you invited onto a project, and research and translation are what let you deliver it.
Spencer Hulse is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily. He is responsible for overseeing other editors and writers, day-to-day operations, and covering breaking news.
