Muyi Xiao is a producer for The New York Times Visual Investigations team. She is a Non-Resident Fellow at ChinaFile and was previously the ChinaFile Visuals Editor.
In the summer of 2015, Xiao was chosen as one of seven Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights Fellows. As a fellow, she studied at an intensive five-week program at New York University. Right after the fellowship, she was admitted to the International Center for Photography’s (ICP) New Media Narrative program in New York City from which she graduated in summer 2016.
Before coming to New York, Xiao was based in Beijing and worked as a photojouranlist at Tencent, the largest online media outlet in China. Her career started in 2012 with a one-year internship at the Reuters Beijing desk as an editor before becoming a photojournalist. She covered a wide range of stories throughout China during her time as a photojournalist, including the missing flight MH370, a cult religion called “Mighty God,” child marriages, and more. These dispatch assignments exposed her to a broad range of issues in her home country, inspiring her to pursue long-term stories as a documentary photographer. After she studied with ICP, she went back to China and continued her work as a freelance photographer for half a year until she started to work at ChinaFile in 2017 in New York City.
