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Zi’en Cui is a leading Chinese independent filmmaker, writer, and critic. He lived in Beijing for a long time and now is based in North Florida. A pathbreaking queer filmmaker, Cui has written, directed and produced nearly two-dozen fiction and non-fiction films, notably the following:

• Enter the Clowns, 2002
• The Old Testament, 2002
• Night Scene, 2004
• We Are the … of Communism, 2007
• Queer China, Comrade China, 2009.

A prolific writer and critic, his fiction and critical works include:

• Travel in Film, 1993
• Peach-colored Lips, 1997
• Uncle’s Secular Life, 2003
• Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories, 2003
• Memories of Light and Shadow, 2005
• Big Dipper, 2012.

Cui is a co-founder of the Beijing Queer Film Festival.

Popo Fan is a filmmaker, writer and curator from China. His queer documentaries "Chinese Closet," "Mama Rainbow," "Papa Rainbow" on family issues in China have made a notable impact on Chinese society. In 2017 he relocated from Beijing to Berlin, from then he has concentrated on writing and directing scripted shorts featuring intersectional topics of LGBTQ+, migrants and sex. He has served as an organizer for the Beijing Queer Film Festival for more than a decade, and is also the founder of Queer University Video Training Camp. He participated in Berlinale Talents 2017 and was a jury member of the Teddy Award in 2019. Currently he is developing his debut feature in Germany.

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Popo Fan is a Berlin-based Chinese filmmaker and curator. His films include queer activism documentaries and scripted, sex-positive shorts.

A Taiwanese director and screenwriter, Zero Chou 周美玲 is famous for aesthetical creativity and philosophical thinking. Chou graduated from the National Chengchi University with a bachelor degree in Philosophy.

Chou is a director who has dedicated her entire professional career to depicting LGBT+ relationships. Being the only Taiwanese director who is openly lesbian, her characters are thoroughly contemplated and relatively realistic. Together with her cinematographer partner, she has launched a project called RainbowAround with the idea to produce 6 films about the LGBT+ communities of different Asian cities.

She is the only Taiwanese female filmmaker who was invited to be Oscars Academy membership in 2019. Before, there are Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Ying Qian, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

As a scholar of cinema and media, Ying Qian is interested in understanding the role of media and mediation in shaping politics, forming knowledge, and connecting realms of experience. Within the Chinese language context, she’s particularly interested in how politics, techniques and aesthetics of mediation have been integral to the processes of (semi-)colonialism, warfare, revolutions, popular movements, and (post)socialisms.

Her publications include Becoming Reality: Documentary Cinema in Revolutionary China, 1906-1989 (Columbia University Press 2021); “When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism: Documentary Cinema in China’s Great Leap Forward” Critical Inquiry, v.46, no.3, Spring 2020.

Jim Cheng has been the director of C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University since 2010, and served in East Asia Library, Law library at University of Washington, the University of Iowa Libraries, and International Relations & Pacific Studies Library and East Asia Collection at the University of California, San Diego. Cheng served as the President of CEAL (Council on East Asian Libraries) 2016-2018. Due to his distinctive and innovative contribution in library collections of East Asian films, holding Film Festivals and symposiums on East Asian films, Library Journal named Cheng as one of the 2008 Movers and Shakers. In 2009, he won the Fulbright Scholar Senior Research Award for his book project in Taiwan Film Studies.

Cheng has a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, a M.A. in Comparative Literature and a M.L.S. in Library & Information Science from University of Washington, Seattle. His professional activities and academic works involve library information, digital projects, library special collection development, and film studies

Publications

• Cheng, Jim. An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies. Columbia University Press, 2016.
• Cheng, Jim. “Past, Present, and Future of East Asian Collections at the University of California, San Diego,” in Collecting Asian: East Asian Libraries in North America, 1868-2008, edited by Peter X. Zhou (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2010), 320-327.
• Cheng, Jim. “Chinese Underground Film Collection at UCSD Libraries,” in From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, edited by Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (Lanham, Md.: Rome and Littlefield, 2006), 209-243.
• Cheng, Jim. An Annotated Bibliography for Chinese Film Study. Hong Kong University Press, 2004.