Jeon Do-yeon has become the first Korean actress to be a jury member at Cannes International Film Festival in its upcoming edition.

The actress has been announced as one of nine panel members who will join jury president Jane Campion. Jeon won the Best Actress prize at the renowned film festival in 2007 for playing the emotionally distraught mother in Lee Chang-dong’s drama “Secret Sunshine.”

Joining Jeon and Campion as the main competition jury members are Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, American director Sofia Coppola and Danish director and screenwriter Nicolas Winding Refn. Mexican filmmaker and actor Gael Garcia Bernal, French actress and fashion model Carole Bouquet, American actor Willem Dafoe and Iranian actress Leila Hatami have also made the list.

The first Korean cineaste to participate as a festival jury member is filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. He joined French actress Isabelle Huppert, Taiwanese actress Shu Qi and American actress Robin Wright on the panel for the festival’s 2009 edition.

Jeon, who started off as a TV actress in the early 1990s, made her film debut in 1997 in Jang Yoon-hyeon’s romance “The Contact,” which became the second largest -grossing Korean film of that year. Some of her best-known works include 2005 tearjerker “You Are My Sunshine,” in which she starred as a HIV-positive prostitute; “Secret Sunshine,” which won her the Best Actress Prize at Cannes; and the melodramatic thriller “The Housemaid,” which also competed in competition at Cannes in 2010.

This year’s Cannes International Film Festival will run from May 15-25.

By Claire Lee (dyc@heraldcorp.com)