Betty Yu is a Chinese-American NYC based filmmaker, multi-media artist, media educator and social justice activist. Her documentary “Resilience” about her garment worker mother fighting against sweatshop conditions, screened at national and international film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Betty was a 2012 Artist in Resident with the Laundromat Project. Yu’s interactive multi-media installation, “The Garment Worker” was featured at Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive 2014. She recently co-created the “Monument to Anti-Displacement Organizing” which is part of the Agitprop! show at the Brooklyn Museum. Additionally she is a co-founder of the Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective telling stories of Chinatown tenants fighting gentrification through public projections. Betty is the recipient of the 2016 SOAPBOX Award from the Laundromat Project. She is currently an artist-in-resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City. Betty is also an adjunct professor at various colleges teaching new media, art and video production. Betty is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art for her collaborative project with Chinatown Art Brigade. She holds a B.F.A. from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and a M.F.A. from Hunter College.
Ms. Yu’s organizing recognitions include being the recipient of the Union Square Award for grassroots activism and a semi-finalist of the National Brick “Do Something” Award for community leadership in Chinatown. Ms. Yu is currently on the Board of Directors of Working Films, Deep Dish TV and Third World Newsreel, progressive media and film organizations.
Work
Some of Yu’s documentary films such as Discovering My Grandfather Through Mao (2012) and a current work-in-progress, An Unknown Home (2017), can be seen on her Vimeo Channel. Fragments of You, an interactive non-linear video diary website (2010-2015) can be experienced here.
