Leslie Tai

Leslie Tai (2020) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work chronicles the dreams, anxieties and consumer desire of China’s rising middle class and the Chinese diaspora from a distinctly female perspective. Her work has screened worldwide at venues such as the Tribeca Film Festival, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, IDFA, Visions du Réel and broadcast online at New York Times Op-Docs. From 2006-2011, she lived and worked in the underground documentary film world in Beijing and Guangzhou, China. Tai is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to China and Creative Capital Award. She has received grants from Fork Films, California Humanities, Field of Vision, SFFILM, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Firelight Media, Women in Film, Tribeca Film Institute, among others; and fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, Berlinale Talents and Bogliasco Foundation.

As a Logan Nonfiction fellow, Leslie will work on her documentary, “How to Have an American Baby,” a kaleidoscopic voyage behind the closed doors of the Chinese birth tourism industry—a booming shadow economy catering to Chinese tourists who travel to Southern California on “birthing vacations” in order to obtain U.S. citizenship for their babies.