Richard Peña

on February 5, 2014

Richard Peña was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival from 1988 to 2012. At the Film Society, Peña organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura, and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Norwegian, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Taiwanese, and Argentine cinema. He is a Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema, and from 2006 to 2009 was a Visiting Professor in Spanish at Princeton University. He is also currently the co-host of WNET/Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.

Richard McGregor

on February 5, 2014

Richard McGregor is a Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute. He is the former Washington and Beijing Bureau Chief for The Financial Times, and the author ofThe Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers and Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century.

Craig Simons

on February 5, 2014

A longtime China journalist, Craig Simons is writing a book about China’s large – and growing – global environmental footprint. The book, as yet untitled, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in late 2012 or early 2013. Craig was the Asia bureau chief for Cox Newspapers from 2005 until 2009 and before that reported from Beijing and Chongqing for Newsweek. He has written for other magazines and newspapers including Outside, Backpacker, The New York Times, and Science. In 2011, he was a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which funded some of the reporting used in these stories

Richard Bernstein

on February 5, 2014

Richard Bernstein was born in New York but grew up on a poultry farm in East Haddam, CT. He received his B.A. from the University of Connecticut and then spent five years in a Ph.D. program at Harvard in history and East Asian Languages. In 1973, Bernstein became a staff writer at Time magazine, which sent him first to Hong Kong as a correspondent covering China and Southeast Asia, then to China where he opened the magazine’s bureau in Beijing. He moved to The New York Times in 1982 and served as the paper’s bureau chief at the United Nations, in Paris, and in Berlin. He is the author of eight books including Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment (Vintage, 2002) and A Girl Named Faithful Plum (Knopf, 2011).

Rian Dundon

on February 5, 2014

Rian Dundon (b. 1980) is a photographer living in Oakland, California. His work has appeared in TIME, Newsweek, and The New York Times, among other publications, and has been exhibited in Beijing, London, Siem Reap, and New York. Rian is a graduate of the Social Documentation masters program at UC Santa Cruz and has lectured or taught courses in photography at U.C.S.C., The International Center of Photography, New York University, and the San Francisco Art Institute. His first book, Changsha, is a record of the six years he lived and worked in Mainland China.

Rachel Lu

on February 5, 2014

Rachel Lu is the co-founder and co-editor of Tea Leaf Nation, an English-language online magazine that synthesizes and analyzes Chinese social media. Tea Leaf Nation is a partner site with The Atlantic and has dozens of volunteer contributors.

Lu was born in China. She is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School.

Rachel Beitarie

on February 5, 2014

Rachel Beitarie is a Middle East-born and long-time Beijing-based freelance writer. She has published extensively in Israeli publications and has also contributed to venues such as Foreign Policy, Circle of Blue, and China Digital Times.

Christine Lu

on February 5, 2014

Christine Lu is the co-founder and CEO of Affinity China, a lifestyle platform for affluent Chinese travelers. Involved in cross-border China business for the past eighteen years, Lu is regarded as a connector at the intersection of Chinese outbound travel and luxury. She spent five years in China as head of Marketing for Home Shopping Network’s joint venture TVSN, where she oversaw the company’s marketing, e-commerce, and mail-order catalog business. She was the co-organizer of TEDxShanghai, the first TEDx in China, as well as of GeeksOnAPlane with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Dave McClure. Lu is on the advisory board for GMIC Silicon Valley. She graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations.

Christian Caryl

on February 5, 2014

Christian Caryl is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a senior fellow with the Legatum Institute. He is the editor of Democracy Lab, a special project of the Legatum Institue published by Foreign Policy that follows transitions from authoritarianism to democracy world-wide. Christian worked as Washington bureau chief for Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was a foreign correspondent and ran the Tokyo and Moscow bureaus for Newsweek. He has reported from about 50 countries, and his assignments have ranged from Japanese cuisine to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His first journalistic assignment was covering the collapse of communist East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has lived in Germany for thirteen years, Russia for seven, Japan for five, Kazakhstan for one, and Hong Kong for four months.