Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, LA. He is the author of Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (2009), Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (2014), Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2021, 2022), Enter the Clowns: The Queer Cinema of Cui Zi’en (2022), Voiceover: Conversations with Sinophone Filmmakers (2024), and Between the Lines: Conversations with Contemporary Chinese Writers (2025). His most recent monograph, Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary (2022), explores the intersection of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns, and Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary. He is also the editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader in Taiwan History and Culture (2020, 2022) and co-editor of Divided Lenses (2016) and Modernism Revisited (2016).
He has contributed to numerous books and periodicals, including The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, A Companion to Chinese Cinema, Electric Shadows: A Century of Chinese Cinema, Columbia Companion of Modern Chinese Literature, Harvard New Literary History of Modern China, and The Chinese Cinema Book. He is also the translator of several books, including Wild Kids (2000), Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (2002), To Live (2004), The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008), Remains of Life (2017), Han Song’s “Hospital Trilogy” (2023, 2025), and Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary (2020), The Running Flame (2025), and Soft Burial (2025).
A Guggenheim Fellow (2023) and a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow (2008, 2021), Berry has received Honorable Mentions for the MLA Louis Roth Translation Prize (2009) and the Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize (2020); he has served on the jury for the Dream of the Red Chamber Prize (2012-2018) and has served as a Jury Member for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse Film Festival (2010, 2018) and the Fresh Wave (2013, 2022).
