
Xinyan is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington DC.
A native of Wuhan, China, Xinyan started her video journalism career in 2012 producing for BBC News in Beijing, covering the Asia Pacific region for six years.
In 2018, she became a founding member of Inkstone, an innovative news app featuring daily digests of US-China news targeting millennial audiences, and launched South China Morning Post‘s North America video team in New York as its senior video producer.
In 2020, Xinyan returned to the BBC News and worked as a senior video journalist covering breaking news in the US. She is now a freelance video journalist and co-directing Made in Ethiopia (working title), her first feature documentary about Chinese investment in Ethiopia.
Xinyan's passion for storytelling stems from her background growing up in a community of Chinese state-owned steel factory workers. Her work straddles two worlds - documenting the socioeconomic and geopolitical changes in the Global South where she is from and amplifying the voices of underrepresented communities in the developed world where she is living and working now.
Xinyan is a fellow at Firelight Media Doc Lab, a mentee at the DOCNYC x Video Consortium Storytelling Incubator and an alumnus of the Yaddo Residency. She is also a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Asian American Documentary Network, Video Consortium and Documentary Cinematographer Alliance.