Leslie Tai is an award-winning Chinese-American filmmaker from San Francisco, California. Her shorts have premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, IDFA, and Visions du Réel. From 2006 to 2011, Tai studied under Wu Wenguang, a founding figure of the New Independent Chinese Documentary Movement, at his Beijing-based studio Caochangdi Workstation.
Tai is the Director/Producer/Cinematographer/Editor of How to Have an American Baby, her feature debut. Her short film The Private Life of Fenfen (2013), a multi-layered representation of a Chinese migrant worker’s video diaries, won “Best Film” awards at Kasseler Dokfest and Images Festival. In 2013, Tai received the “Emerging Filmmaker Award” from San Diego Asian Film Festival for her two shorts: Grave Goods (2013), about the sublime objects of her deceased grandmother, and Superior Life Classroom (2012), about the Taiwanese immigrant housewives of Silicon Valley who sell Amway products. Her recent short, My American Surrogate (2019), about Chinese elites hiring American surrogates to carry their babies for them, was commissioned by The New York Times Op-Docs series and the Pulitzer Center, and it won Best Short Documentary at San Diego Asian Film Festival.
Her work is supported by organizations such as Creative Capital, Field of Vision, Fork Films, SFFILM, California Humanities, and Firelight Media, and by fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco, Wexner Center for the Arts, NYFF’s Artist Academy, and Berlinale Talents. Tai is a Fulbright Scholar to China and holds a B.A. in Design|Media Arts from UCLA and an M.F.A. in Documentary Film/Video from Stanford University.
