CONG Feng / 丛峰 was born in Chengde, Hebei province, 1972. Poet and film maker. Editor member of the online film magazine Film Auteur. His major film works including Doctor Ma’s Country Clinic, The Unfinished History of Life, and Stratum 1: The Visitors.
DONG Bingfeng / 董冰峰 is an independent curator and producer based in Beijing. Since April 2012, he has been the Artistic Directory at Li Xianting’s Film Fund. From 2005 to 2012, he worked as a curator at Guangdong Museum of Art, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and as the director of the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.
GUO Hanfen / 郭漢芬 was born and raised in Hong Kong. He enrolled in the Master’s program of directing at the Beijing Film Academy after obtaining his BA in English from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Gyatso Gentsu / 白斌 was born in Garzê County, Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province in 1978. He obtained a Master of Arts in Chinese painting from Sichuang Academy of Fine Arts in 2001.
LI Youjie / 李有杰 was born in 1982 in Yunnan Province, China. Graduated from High School Attached to Yunnan Art Academy in 2003, and in 2007 graduated from Film and TV Department of Yunnan Art Academy. His graduation short documentary film Growing Up had won the 2nd Price of 2007 China·Anji College Film Festival, and was selected in several film festivals. In 2013, he finished his first feature-length independent documentary film Alao’s Village.
Charles Yi-yong Lim / 林育荣 was born in Singapore in 1973 and currently lives and works there. His work was featured in the Singapore Biennale in 2011.
MA Li / 马莉 was born in 1975 in Zhejiang, China. She currently lives in Beijing, as an independent documentary filmmaker.
WANG Haiyang / 王海洋 was born in Shandong Province in 1984. He graduated from the Printmaking Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
WANG Nanfu / 王男栿 is an independent documentary filmmaker originally from China and currently based in New York City. She has an MA in Journalism from NYU, an MA in Media Studies from Ohio University, and an MA in English Literature from Shanghai University.
WEN Muye / 文牧野 has a Master’s degree in directing from the Beijing Film Academy where he was mentored by the Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang.
XIE Yihui / 谢贻卉 was born in Chengdu, Sichuan in 1967. For a long period she worked in human resources. Xie became acquainted with documentary filmmaking when she assisted Ai Xiaoming in making a film following the Sichuan Earthquake in May 2008. In 2012, Xie finished her film, Starvation Report on Rightist Li Shengzhao. In 2013, Xie completed Juvenile Laborers Confined in Dabao.
ZHANG Meng / 张猛 was born in northeast China. He graduated from China Central Academy of Drama. In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Lucky Dog, which earned him the Asian New Talent Award at the 10th Shanghai International Film Festival, and the Best New Director at the Chinese Media Awards 2009. He directed his first documentary Mr. Zhang and His Dog in 2008, and THE PIANO IN A FACTORY in 2010.
ZHANG Zhen / 张真 is associate professor and associate chair of Cinema Studies, NYU. She is founder and co-organizer of Reel China@NYU, and Director of Asian Film and Media Initiative. Her publications include the award-winning An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century; and in Chinese, a poetry collection, 梦中楼阁 (Dream Loft) and (as editor) a special issue on Chinese independent documentary for Chinese Independent Cinema (Li Xianting Film Fund, 2013). A co-edited volume (with Angela Zito), DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformation, is forthcoming from University of Hawaii Press.
ZHOU Hao / 周浩 worked as a photojournalist for Xinhua News Agency and Southern Weekly Magazine. He started making documentary films in 2001. His films include Senior Year (2006), Using (2008), Cop Shop (2010), and Emergency Room China (2013), which have been shown at many festivals abroad and in China.
Angela Zito writes, teaches and curates at NYU where she is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Religious Studies Program, and an associate faculty in Cinema Studies. She co-founded and co-directs the Center for Religion and Media and has co-produced four versions of the biennial documentary film festival Reel China@NYU. Her first documentary film, Writing in Water (2012, 42 min) is part of a study in Beijing about its “third spaces”, places where people congregate and make things, using the opportunity to create new public spaces as they produce cultural expressions.