Ying Qian is an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Culture, Columbia University. She received her doctoral degree from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2013. She is interested in a wide range of topics in Chinese literature, cinema and media studies, including documentary cinema in comparative perspectives, experience and memory of China’s revolutions and socialism, and writing, translation and filmmaking in China’s multi-lingual and multi-ethnic border regions and among the Chinese diaspora.
Besides academic research, she has been a filmmaker, critic, and film programmer. She has been programming documentary and Asian cinemas for the last five years. Her film criticism has appeared in Chinese, English and Czech language newspapers and journals, and her own documentary and short films have been exhibited and broadcasted in a number of countries.