Leslie Tai is a Chinese American filmmaker from San Francisco whose work chronicles the dreams, anxieties, and consumer desire of China’s rising middle class and Chinese diaspora through a distinctly female lens. Her award-winning shorts have premiered at Tribeca, MoMA, IDFA, Visions du Réel, and on The New York Times Op-Docs and have screened at venues such as BAMPFA, REDCAT, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and The Wexner Center for the Arts.
Tai is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to China and a Creative Capital Award. From 2006-2011, she lived and worked in the underground documentary film scene in Beijing as a student of Wu Wenguang.
Her feature debut How to Have an American Baby, a kaleidoscopic voyage into the shadow economy of Chinese birth tourism in Southern California, premiered at True/False Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on PBS. She is developing a sequel work, The Birth Tourists, a multi-channel video installation, sculpted out of nearly 200 hours of new material. Unleashed from the constraints of a Western linearity, the new work will, even more pointedly than the film, evoke and disturb our notions of the “sanctity” of nationhood, borders, morality, and feature the female body as a place where the political, the personal, and the commercial converge. She released a short documentary on The New York Times Op-Docs about wealthy Chinese hiring American surrogates. The film, My American Surrogate, was made in partnership with The New York Times, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and Tribeca Film Institute.
At MacDowell in 2016 and 2019, Tai made significant progress in the editing How to Have an American Baby. The film received grants from California Humanities and Center for Cultural Innovation; and fellowships from Berlinale Talents, MacDowell, and San Francisco Film Society. During her 2024 residency, Tai worked on an outline of a new narrative feature screenplay, based on a police incident report she wrote 25 years ago.
