Team

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a writer, filmmaker, and curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her research, in theory and practice, explores cinema and moving image art in relation to decoloniality, personal expressions, and eastern philosophies, with a focus on creative documentary and essayistic nonfiction, women’s cinema and Chinese cinemas. Kiki received international recognition and praise through awards, invited keynotes and talks. Her current project 'Daoism and Cinema' engages film and moving image with Daoist philosophy, ecology and East Asian art and literary history. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), the co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and the special issue of Studies in Documentary Film “Feminist Approaches in Women’s First Person Documentaries from East Asia” (2020 14:1). Her articles appeared on Screen, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Studies in Documentary Film, World Cinema and the Essay Film, Amateur Filmmaking, the Conversation, etc. Kiki’s award-winning films, including Photographing Shenzhen (2006), Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), have been shown widely at international film festivals and art institutions, such as IDFA, Vision Du Reel, Helsinki DocPoint, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Beijing International Film Festival, the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, British Film Institute, London V&A Museum, etc. Her curatorial projects include Polyphonic China: Chinese independent documentary (London 2009), New Generation Chinese Cinema (London 20210) ,  Memory Talks: Personal Cinema (Shanghai 2017) and most recently The Spirit of Mountains and Water: Gao Shiqiang’s Moving Image Art through Cosmological Thinking (London 2023).  www.kikitianqiyu.com