Jemma Paek graduated from the University of Oxford in 2018 with a BA in Spanish and Russian, studying language and literature with a specialist paper on Literature and the Visual Arts. In 2020, Jemma returned to Oxford University to complete a Masters in Russian Literature and Culture, and was awarded the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty Prize for Best Dissertation for a thesis interrogating queer storytelling and national identity in contemporary Georgian and Russian cinema. That same year, Jemma won the UK Sunday Times’ A.A. Gill Award for Emerging Food Critics for an article detailing working in a silver service restaurant on the eve of COVID’s first lockdown. Other food writing works have been published by The Guardian newspaper. Jemma is a co-founder of daikon* zine, a platform for the writing and art of South-East and East Asian women and non-binary people based in Europe. 

In autumn of 2022, Jemma enrolled in Harvard’s Slavic Languages and Literature PhD program, with the intention of carrying out further study of queer contemporary cinema in the post-Soviet field. Other fields of interest include Iconography, the interrelationship between music and dance in ballet and contemporary dance, and social media spaces as loci for the figuring of individual identities.