Ruby Yang (楊紫燁; Simplified Chinese: 杨紫烨), is a Hong Kong-born American filmmaker.[1] Yang has worked as film director and editor, on a range of feature and documentary films exploring Chinese themes.[2]
Born in Hong Kong. She moved to the United States in 1977, to studied filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. After graduation, she worked as an editor on many Chinese American documentaries and mainstream Hollywood films.
She won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for The Blood of Yingzhou District (2006), and received other awards including an Emmy, the DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award, FilmAid Asia's Humanitarian Award, the Global Health Council Media Award and two IDA Pare Lorentz Award nominations.
In 2003, along with filmmaker Thomas F. Lennon, Yang founded the Chang Ai Media Project to raise HIV/AIDS awareness in China. Since then, its documentaries and public service announcements have been seen by hundreds of millions of Chinese viewers. Lennon and Yang made a trilogy of short documentary films about modern China, including The Blood of Yingzhou District, Tongzhi in Love (2008) and The Warriors of Qiugang, which was nominated for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2011.
Yang relocated to Beijing in 2004 and moved back to Hong Kong in 2013. She was appointed by the University of Hong Kong as Hung Leung Hau Ling Distinguished Fellow in Humanities in the fall of 2013.[3] [4] Her recent feature documentary My Voice, My Life《争氣》opened in 13 theatres in Hong Kong and Macau. The Wall Street Journal named it "Hong Kong’s five most notable films of 2014".[5] It won the 2015 NPT Human Spirit Award at the Nashville Film Festival.
In 2015, Yang led the establishment of a new documentary project, named HK Documentary Initiative,[6] aiming at fostering the development of the Hong Kong documentary industry. The efforts of the project fall into three categories, Seed Grants, Master Class, and Documentary Literacy. Yang herself is the director and one of the creative advisors to support emerging documentary filmmakers in Hong Kong. In July 2024, Yang was appointed as the director of