Leslie Tai

Leslie Tai⠀is a Chinese-American artist and filmmaker from San Francisco, California. Her nonfiction shorts have premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, IDFA, Visions du Réel and The New York Times. From 2006-2011, Tai made and exhibited work in the underground Beijing documentary film movement, as a student of Chinese filmmaker Wu Wenguang. Her short film _The Private Life of Fenfen _(2013), a multi-layered representation of a young Chinese migrant worker’s video diaries, won Best Film at Kasseler Dokfest and Images Festival. Her recent short My American Surrogate (2019), about the Chinese elite hiring American surrogates to carry their babies for them, was commissioned by _The New York Times _Op-Docs series and Pulitzer Center, and awarded Best Short Documentary at the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her forthcoming feature debut, The Birth Tourists (2023), is a kaleidoscopic journey into the fates and fortunes of ordinary individuals caught in the web of the Chinese birth tourism industry in Southern California.

Her work has been supported by organizations such as Creative Capital, Field of Vision, Fork Films, SFFILM, California Humanities, Firelight Media, Tribeca Film Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco Foundation, Logan Nonfiction Program, the 57th New York Film Festival Artist Academy, and Berlinale Talents. Tai holds an M.F.A. in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University and a B.A. in Design|Media Arts from UCLA.