Meet Yuna Park: The Korean Model Crossing Borders, Languages, and Creative Fields

Before Yuna Park was featured in campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, she was studying Economics in South Korea and preparing for a very different kind of career.

Then her path took her further than she may have expected.

She interned at ECLAC, the United Nations regional commission, in Chile, stepping into a world of policy and international cooperation far removed from fashion or entertainment. From there, she moved to Mexico, where she earned a Master's degree in Political Science at UNAM. It was only after finishing that degree that she made a decision that would change the direction of her life: she would stop watching from behind the scenes and step in front of the camera.

Today, Yuna is a Korean commercial model and actress who has built her career primarily out of Mexico, appearing in campaigns and productions for major global brands and platforms including Apple, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta, Samsung, Amazon Fashion, Gucci × El Palacio de Hierro, Johnnie Walker, Nissan, Hims & Hers, Tinder, Vibram, Uber Eats, Snapchat and Zalando, several of them in leading roles.

But the resume is really just the surface. What stands out more is the route that got her there, and everything she's built alongside it.

Yuna's story doesn't move in a straight line. It moves from South Korea, where she grew up and studied Economics, to Spain, where she first lived abroad as an undergraduate exchange student, then to Chile, where she worked in international policy, and finally to Mexico, where she built an entirely different kind of career from the ground up.

Each move came with its own adjustment: a new professional world, a new set of people to learn from, a new place to figure out from scratch. By the time she arrived in Mexico, she was already someone who had rebuilt her footing more than once.

"I had always been drawn to creative work and to expressing myself through performance," she says of the instinct that eventually pulled her toward modeling. That interest had been there in South Korea too, where she'd had some early experience behind the scenes in advertising and production. Mexico simply became the place where she finally acted on it.

Fluent in Korean, English and Spanish, Yuna moves between languages as easily as she moves between the different parts of her career, whether she's on set with an international crew, developing her own creative projects, or connecting with people across the countries she's called home.

Yuna's commercial work spans technology, fashion, lifestyle and entertainment, connecting her with directors, production companies, agencies and creative teams from different countries. Her campaigns for brands including Apple, Samsung, Meta, Amazon Fashion, Gucci, Johnnie Walker and OpenAI have reached audiences well beyond Mexico, where her career is based.

For Yuna, though, the international scope of her work isn't only about the brands attached to her name. It's also about the different cultures, languages and creative environments she gets to move through along the way, a natural extension of a life that has already spanned four countries.

Modeling became Yuna's primary career, but it also opened the door to other forms of performance.

Her work has expanded into acting, dance and music videos, including an appearance in a music video for Masego. Outside commercial work, she directed an independent documentary focused on cempasúchil flower workers in Mexico, highlighting the people who grow the marigolds closely associated with Día de los Muertos. The documentary was later screened as part of a Día de los Muertos cultural program.

She has also explored visual art through oil painting and performed stand-up comedy in Spanish in Mexico, another outlet for the same instinct that first drew her toward modeling: the desire to communicate and express herself in front of an audience, in whatever form that takes.

If there's a philosophy connecting Yuna's choices, it's a willingness to begin before she feels completely prepared.

She left one country for another more than once, first for studies, then for an internship, then for graduate school, and finally to build a career that had nothing to do with either. Along the way, she also chose to step onto a comedy stage.

"You don't have to wait until everything feels perfect to begin," she says. "It's okay to start modeling later than you once imagined. It's okay to move to another country even when you're scared and don't know anyone. It's even okay to step onto a stand-up comedy stage in another language when you don't feel perfectly prepared."

It's a fitting summary for a career that has developed through a series of moves few people attempt back to back.

Today, Yuna continues to work primarily as a commercial model while expanding further into acting, and she's developing her own projects in filmmaking and visual art.

Her long-term ambitions reflect the path she's already taken. Rather than choosing between commercial work, acting and personal creative projects, she wants to build a career where all of them can coexist.

Having lived and worked across South Korea, Spain, Chile and Mexico, Yuna is particularly drawn to projects that let her move naturally between cultures, languages and different approaches to storytelling, while staying grounded in her own perspective.

Her story isn't just about becoming a successful Korean model in Mexico. It's about a career built by someone who kept crossing borders, both literally and creatively, and never treated any one of those worlds as the whole picture.