After completing her BA and MA at York University, she relocated from Canada to study languages in East Asia. Following several years in Japan and South Korea, she began her PhD in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Her PhD involved long-term field work with North Korean refugee communities in Japan and South Korea gathering oral histories on the subjective experience of surviving the 1990s famine. Her doctoral research was nominated for several awards and reviewed favorably in academic and main-stream outlets when published, Marching through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (Columbia University Press, 2015).

Her second book Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press, 2019) accounts for abuses committed by the North Korean state, domestically and internationally. Currently, she is writing a book about how state governments cover up rights abuses through video technology. The working title is States, Lies, and Video: A Century of States Using Video to Deny Human Rights Abuses.