Sydney is a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her interdisciplinary research engages the Korean diaspora through the prisms of memory, gender-based violence, and aesthetic form, with particular emphasis on the afterlives of war, grief, and empire. Grounded in ethnomusicology, critical race theory, and decoloniality, her work considers how sonic and literary practices bear witness to trauma and give rise to diasporic modes of relation at the nation-state level.

She holds a B.A. in Anthropology and a B.A. Geography from the University of California, Berkeley (Phi Beta Kappa) and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, where she focused on postcolonial theology, literary form, and visual culture. A writer and musician by training, Sydney brings a deep investment in creative writing, oral history, and performance studies to her scholarship. She is particularly attuned to the ways in which lyrical narrative and musical expression transmit intergenerational knowledge and unsettle colonial epistemologies.

Sydney is the founder of Aporia Writers, an educational consultancy dedicated to cultivating intellectual and creative excellence among students from diverse backgrounds. She has taught at both secondary and postsecondary levels and remains committed to the transformative potential of interdisciplinary pedagogy, narrative justice, and diasporic cultural production.