Filmmaker
Anita Chang
Anita Chang is an artist, writer and educator, who works with various media forms, including film, digital video, photography, installation and the web. She has been making films for 25 years. Her films have been screened and broadcast internationally, and presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now, Walker Arts Center, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and National Museum of Women. Honors include grant awards from Creative Capital, Fulbright, San Francisco Arts Commission, National Geographic All Roads and the KQED Peter J. Owens Filmmaker program.
Chang’s research and creative practice examine the ways postcolonial, diasporic, and multicultural societies represent themselves in various visual media, with a focus on retelling and reviving their stories and histories, along with the impact these works have on their respective communities and nations. Chang’s moving image works reflect observations and philosophical explorations of ideas, such as inequality, spirituality and freedom. In pushing the boundaries of the moving image medium, she experiments with the interplay between content and form to inspire different kinds of audience engagements. Many of her creative works focus on the experiences of women and girls, minorities, immigrants, exiles, and disenfranchised communities. They are engaged with and complicate discourses on (post)colonialism, ethnography, diaspora, race, gender and cross-cultural representation.
Chang has taught film production and media studies in community-based and academic organizations in the Bay Area, Nepal and Taiwan, including the Department of Indigenous Languages and Communication at National Dong Hwa University. She is the author of Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics, and has published in American Quarterly, Verge, positions, Concentric and Taiwan Journal of Indigenous Studies. She is currently associate professor of communication at California State University, East Bay. (08/01)
Available Title(s):
She Wants to Talk to You
A film by Anita Chang, 2001, 29 min, Color
In October 1999 filmmaker Anita Chang befriended three 13-year-old girls – Monika Rasali, Sushma Sada and Vinita Shrestha – while living in Kathmandu, Nepal. Honestly presenting themselves in front of the camera, these girls share with the filmmaker their ideas on marriage, friendship and spirituality. Their recordings provide a complex and poignant framework for three…
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