Xinyan is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington DC, United States. She has a decade of experience working in top-tier newsrooms, including the Associated Press, BBC News and Hong Kong's flagship newspaper, South China Morning Post.

Xinyan is a creative storyteller with a track record of delivering high-impact character-driven multimedia content. She works as a director, cinematographer and editor, and has managed international crews in the coverage of many major breaking news events across Asia. 

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Xinyan's work was central to the BBC's Asia Pacific coverage from 2012 to 2018. She told a myriad of stories about people navigating China’s meteoric socioeconomic transformation. She produced two BBC documentaries, China's Science Revolution and China's New Silk Road, in multiple countries, including Poland and Kazakhstan, and co-filmed parts of the BBC documentary, When Wealth is Not Enough. She was also the photographer and field radio producer for the BBC multimedia story and documentary, Inside a Chinese 'ketamine village'. 

In 2018, Xinyan became a founding member of Inkstone, an innovative app offering daily digests of China-focused stories for a global millennial readership. She moved to New York and launched the North America video team for Inkstone's parent publication, South China Morning Post. She produced, shot and edited two short films for SCMP FILM and a series of video features on topics ranging from the US-China trade war to the coronavirus outbreak. 

In 2020, Xinyan returned to the BBC's Washington DC bureau as a senior video journalist to produce its flagship Facebook show Cut Through the Noise. She also produced, shot and edited breaking news features and short films, including Cannabis: America's Green Gold Rush, a 23-minute documentary for BBC World. She is now a freelance video journalist based in Washington, DC, working on her first feature-length documentary. 

Xinyan grew up in a steel town in Wuhan, China along the Yangtze River. She is an alumnus of the University of Hong Kong, Beijing Foreign Studies University and Barnard College.