RUBY YANG, Director

Ruby Yang is a noted Chinese American filmmaker whose work in documentary and dramatic film has earned her an Academy Award and numerous international awards.  She lives and works in Beijing.

Along with producer Thomas Lennon, Yang founded the Chang Ai Media Project in 2003. Since then, its documentaries and public service announcements about AIDS awareness have been seen more than 500 million times. The Blood of Yingzhou District, which Yang directed as part of the project, won the 2006 Oscar for Documentary - Short Subject at the 79th Academy Awards in February, 2007.

Their most recent documentary, Tongzhi in Love, which Yang directed, premiered at the Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival and the Frameline32 Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in June 2008. The film won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival.

Prior to her work in Beijing, Yang directed the 1997 production, Citizen Hong Kong, “unflinching in its honesty, vivid in its kaleidoscopic imagery,” according to the Chicago Reader. Both Citizen Hong Kong and her 2000 production, China 21, aired in Hong Kong, Taiwan and numerous European outlets after showing on PBS for Asian Pacific Heritage Month.

Yang has also edited several feature films, including Joan Chen's debut feature Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl. The movie "[tells] a story that feels nearly mythic in its themes of betrayal, devotion and power," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. "Poetic in its images, devastating in its emotional impact," the film premiered at the Berlin Festival in 1998 and went on to win seven Golden Horses, Taiwan's equivalent of the Academy Award. Yang served as Associate Producer of the film. She also edited Chen's first Hollywood feature, Autumn in New York, starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder.

Yang was Series Editor for Bill Moyers’ Becoming American - the Chinese Experience (PBS, March 2003), supervising editing for the entire series, which received four Emmy nominations.  She spent more than a year working closely with Moyers, producing, “a model documentary that gets almost everything right,” according to the New York Times.

Born in Hong Kong, she moved to San Francisco in 1977. She graduated from San Francisco Art Institute in Painting (BFA) and Filmmaking (MFA) and had been living in San Francisco before relocating to Beijing in 2004.