Xinyan is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington DC.

 

Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Xinyan started her journalism career in 2012 working as a producer covering the Asia Pacific region for BBC News based in Beijing. In 2018, she launched the North America video team for Hong Kong’s flagship newspaper South China Morning Post in New York, and later joined the BBC's Washington DC bureau as a Senior Video Journalist in 2020.

 

In the past decade, Xinyan has covered a wide range of breaking news events, from the Rohingya refugee crisis to the US 2020 Presidential Election. 

 

Now working as an independent filmmaker, Xinyan has directed and produced for international broadcasters and programs including the BBC, NHK, PBS NOVA, PBS Frontline, Channel New Asia, etc. She is a New America National Fellow, a Firelight Media Doc Lab fellow, a Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist fellow and an alumnus of the Yaddo Residency.

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Xinyan's passion for storytelling stems from her experience growing up in a community of steel factory workers and living through dramatic socioeconomic and geopolitical changes in China. Her work now 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.