Ruby Yang

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, directing documentaries and public service announcements for the China AIDS Media Project. The Blood of Yingzhou District, which Yang directed as part of the project, won an Academy Award in February 2007. Along with producer Thomas Lennon, Yang founded the China AIDS Media Project in 2003; since then, its documentaries and public service announcements about AIDS awareness have reached more than 200 million Chinese viewers.

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.

Other work includes editing Spencer Nakasako's A.K.A. Don Bonus, which aired on P.O.V. and won a national Emmy, and the award-winning All Power to the People! The Black Panther Party and Beyond. In 2000, she directed and edited Journey to Silicon Valley, a hugely successful 90-minute documentary for mainland Chinese TV, produced by Eric Xu, the co-founder of Baidu.com. Yang has received grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Creative Work Fund, the Independent Television Service, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Soros Documentary Fund. In 2004, she was a Kaiser Media Fellow, developing her work on HIV/AIDS.

Picture [right]: Ruby Yang [director] Thomas Lennon [producer]