Kayla Tong

Kayla Tong⠀(b. 1993) is a cinematographer and director. She is a Hong Kong native who base also in Los Angeles and London, and have called Missouri and Lisbon home in between. After graduating from USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2015, the narrative and documentary work she lensed have screened in a number of venues such as The New Yorker Documentary Series, Busan International Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, and LA Shorts Fest. She was awarded Best Director at the 2017 Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival for Home is Where the Sunsets, a biographical film she also wrote and shot. Kayla is a Busan’s Asian Film Academy's cinematography fellow, a Visual Communications’s Armed with a Camera Fellowship directing fellow, and a recipient of European Union’s Erasmus Mundas Scholarship. Kayla's rootless upbringing and encounters with people from around the world inform the themes of much of her work, telling stories of diaspora and displacement. Aspired to represent her communities with integrity and authenticity, her films feature strong women and multifaceted Asian communities, and explore the rootlessness of Hongkonger as an evolving identity.