LESLIE TAI

• SHORT FILMS
• My American Surrogate
• The Private Life of Fenfen
• Grave Goods
• Superior Life Classroom
• Burial Shroud

• FEATURE FILMS
• Lonely Lotus
• Sister Heaven Sister Earth

• PHOTOGRAPHY
• A Cupertino Movie

• About

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Leslie Tai (b.1983) is a Chinese-American filmmaker hailing from San Francisco, California. After graduating from UCLA with a B.A. in Design|Media Arts, Leslie moved to China on a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship in 2006. There, she earned her filmmaking chops in the underground Chinese documentary world as a student of Wu Wenguang, a founding figure of the New Chinese Documentary Movement. From 2007-2011, she made and exhibited films as an artist of Wu's Beijing-based studio, Caochangdi Workstation. Tai is recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital Award and a graduate of the MFA Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University. Her short films have premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, Visions du Réel (Nyon), International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and broadcast on The New York Times.

Tai's work chronicles the dreams, anxieties, and consumer desire of China’s rising middle class and the Chinese diaspora from a distinctly female perspective. She is currently in post-production on her feature debut How to Have an American Baby.