La Frances Hui

on February 7, 2014

La Frances Hui is Film Curator at Asia Society New York. She has curated film series featuring contemporary Chinese documentary and fiction films, New Wave Japanese cinema, Japanese documentaries, Thai cinema, and Iranian cinema. She has also curated film director retrospectives featuring Tsai Ming-Liang, Jafar Panahi, and Shohei Imamura. Hui regularly leads on-stage conversations with major film artists including Jia Zhangke, Ang Lee, Jackie Chan, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, John Woo, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.

Hui was the Co-curator of the 2013 Asian American International Film Festival (New York). She also curated a series of independent Chinese documentaries for Film Southasia (Kathmandu). Her writings on film have been published by Cinevue (Asian CineVision) and The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop). Hui was a Committee Member of the Margaret Mead Film Festival and has served on the juries for the South Asian International Film Festival and the New York Indian Film Festival. Additionally, she has been invited to speak at The Museum of Modern Art, New York University, Queens College, Stony Brook University, Taipei National University of the Arts, China Institute, and CUNY-TV.

Kin-ming Liu

on February 7, 2014

Kin-ming Liu, a Hong Kong-based journalist, is a ChinaFile Fellow at the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations and edits ChinaFile's My First Trip section. Liu is currently deputy chief editor of Multi-Media Content at SCMPChinese.com, a forthcoming Chinese-language website of the South China Morning Post (SCMP). Prior to his arrival at the SCMP, Liu spent 5 years at the Hong Kong Economic Journal, where he played a number of different roles. He was also a blogger at PostGlobal, a global debate blog on international affairs and foreign policy run in partnership by The Washington Post and Newsweek.

Previously, Liu was a columnist based in Washington, D.C. He wrote for The New York Sun, The Hong Kong Standard, and other publications. From 1999 to 2005, he worked for the Apple Daily, where he served as Opinion Page editor, director of public affairs, and general manager. Liu was Opinion Page editor at the Hong Kong Economic Times from 1997 to 1999. Since entering the field of journalism in 1992, he has also worked for Yazhou Zhoukan and the Sing Tao Daily.

Liu served as chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association from 1998 to 1999 and as a board member of the Foreign Correspondents' Club, Hong Kong from 1997 to 2001. In 1998 he was the winner of a Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award for English-language commentary.

Liu is the editor of a collection of pieces from the Hong Kong Economic Journal's “My First Trip to China” series was published by Muse in 2012.

Kennett Werner

on February 7, 2014

Kennett Werner is a prospective history major at Princeton University and an intern with the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. Previously he spent the summer in Beijing, working at China's largest independent arts foundation. A native New Yorker, he graduated from the Dalton School.

Kathleen McLaughlin

on February 7, 2014

Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who works as a contributing correspondent at Science. She spent 15 years reporting from China.

McLaughlin has reported from Asia and Africa for a long list of major U.S. and U.K. publications including The Economist, The Washington Post, PBS News Hour, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Buzzfeed.

Katharina Hesse

on February 7, 2014

Katharina Hesse is a Beijing-based photographer who has worked throughout Asia for nearly two decades. Her work primarily focuses on China’s social concerns, among them youth and urban culture, religion, and North Korean refugees. Ms. Hesse has traveled on assignment to Indonesia, Mongolia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Korea and the Philippines. Ms Hesse is fluent in Chinese, English, French and German.

Ms. Hesse began her work in Asia as an assistant for German television (ZDF). In 1996, she started working in Newsweek’s Beijing bureau and subsequently participated in numerous cover projects. In 2003 she moved to Getty Images. She has been freelancing for the past 6 years and her work has been featured in various publications including: Burn, Courrier International, Courrier Japon, Der Spiegel, D della Repubblica, e-photoreview.com, EYEmazing, FT Magazine, Zeit Magazin, Glamour (Germany), IO Donna, Die Zeit, Marie-Claire, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, Manager Magazin ( Germany) , Neon, Ode Pez, 100Eyes.org, Reporters Without Borders ( yearbook 2010, Germany), Stern, TIME Asia, Vanity Fair ( Italy & Germany) and Wired (Italy).

Karen Smith

on February 7, 2014

Karen Smith is a Beijing-based British art historian. She graduated from Wimbledon Art School in 1987 and moved to Asia a year later. Smith settled in China in 1992 with the aim of engaging with an art scene that was then almost unknown beyond its national borders. Through diverse roles both in China and internationally as a writer, critic, and curator, today Smith is an internationally recognized authority on Chinese contemporary art. She is currently finishing a book entitled Bang to Boom: China’s New Art in the 1990s, due out in 2013.

Kaiser Kuo

on February 7, 2014

Kaiser Kuo is the host of the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China that has run since 2010. He was Head of Podcasts and Editor-at-Large for The China Project, and previously served as Director of International Communications for Baidu. In his over 20 years in China, his career ran the gamut from rock music to tech journalism to corporate communications. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and holds an M.A. from the University of Arizona. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Junjie Zhang

on February 7, 2014

Junjie Zhang is the Director of and Associate Professor in the Environmental Research Center and Master of Environmental Policy (iMEP) Program at Duke Kunshan University and Associate Professor of Environmental Economics in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Prior to his current position, he was an Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Zhang’s research centers on empirical issues in environmental and resource economics. He adopts an interdisciplinary approach that integrates social sciences, engineering, and natural sciences to deal with environmental policy problems. His research topics cover air pollution, water resources, energy, and climate change. Zhang is a Senior Advisor at Asia Society. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental and Resource Economics from Duke University, an M.S. and a B.S. in environmental engineering from Tsinghua University, and a B.A. in environmental economics and management from Renmin University of China.

Judith Shapiro

on February 7, 2014

Judith Shapiro is the director of the Masters in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development for the School of International Service at American University. She was one of the first Americans to live in China after U.S.-China relations were normalized in 1979, and taught English at the Hunan Teachers’ College in Changsha, China. She has also taught at Villanova University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Aveiro (Portugal), and the Southwest Agricultural University in Chongqing, China.

Professor Shapiro’s research and teaching focus on global environmental politics and policy, the environmental politics of Asia, and Chinese politics under Mao. She is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books, including China's Environmental Challenges (Polity 2012), Cold Winds, Warm Winds: Intellectual Life in China Today (with Liang Heng, Wesleyan University Press 1987), and Son of the Revolution (with Liang Heng, Knopf 1983), among others. Her book Mao’s War against Nature (Cambridge University Press 2001) inspired a documentary film, Waking the Green Tiger (2011). Professor Shapiro’s latest project is a textbook for Polity Press called China’s Environmental Challenges, published in 2012.

Professor Shapiro earned her Ph.D. from American University’s School of International Service. She holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and another M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, Urbana. Her B.A. from Princeton University is in Anthropology and East Asian Studies. Before coming to American University, she had a lengthy career as an independent writer and commentator on Chinese politics. She also has extensive experience as a legal interpreter of Mandarin Chinese.

Joshua Rosenzweig

on February 7, 2014

Joshua Rosenzweig is a Business and Human Rights Strategy Advisor/Analyst at Amnesty International’s East Asia Regional Office in Hong Kong, where he has lived since 2008. An observer of all things Chinese for more than 25 years, he has more than a decade of experience researching, analyzing, and teaching about human rights developments and criminal justice in China. His current work focuses on the human rights impacts of Chinese business operations overseas and promoting responsible business conduct and corporate accountability.

He received his Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he wrote a thesis on the interactions between criminal justice and public opinion in contemporary China. From 2002 to 2011, he was a Researcher for The Dui Hua Foundation, where he developed the foundation’s comprehensive database of information about Chinese political and religious prisoners and authored more than a dozen volumes in its series of occasional publications. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Rosenzweig pursued graduate studies in Modern Chinese History at the University of California at Berkeley and has extensive research experience working in Chinese archives and libraries.