About

Lia Chang. Photo by Erich McMillan-McCall

Lia Chang is an actor, a multi-media content producer, activist, documentarian, corporate photographer and an Award winning filmmaker and co-founder of Bev’s Girl Films, making films that foster inclusion and diversity on both sides of the camera. Lia is also the host and Executive Producer of BACKSTAGE PASS WITH LIA CHANG, a weekly Arts and Entertainment and Lifestyle program that airs on Sundays at 6:30pm on FIOS 34, RCN 83, Spectrum 56/1996, and streams on MNN2.

Bev’s Girl Films’ debut short film, Hide and Seek was a top ten film in the Asian American Film Lab’s 2015 72 Hour Shootout Filmmaking Competition, and she received a Best Actress nomination. Her short film, When the World Was Young garnered a 2021 DisOrient Film Audience Choice Award for Best Short Narrative. Lia has appeared in the films Wolf, New Jack City, A Kiss Before Dying, King of New York, Big Trouble in Little China, The Last Dragon, Taxman. She stars in and served as Executive Producer for the short independent films Hide and Seek, Balancing Act, Rom-Com Gone Wrong, Belongingness and When the World was Young. She is also the Executive Producer for The Cactus, The Language Lesson, The Writer and Cream and 2 Shugahs. BGF collaborates with and produces multi-media content for artists, actors, designers, theatrical productions, composers, musicians and corporations.

Lia was a syndicated columnist for KYODO News, writing about arts and entertainment in her What’s Hot in New York column from 1995-2004. Her in-depth features and photographs have appeared in Vanity Fair, Gourmet, Women’s Wear Daily, The Paris Review, TV Guide, Daily Variety, American Theatre, Broadwayworld.com, Life & Style, OUT, New York Magazine, InStyle, Timeout.com, Playbill.com, Theatermania.com, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, New York Times and Washington Post. She writes about culture, style and Asian American issues for a variety of publications and her Backstage Pass with Lia Chang blog.

Lia is a National Tropical Botanical Garden Environmental Journalism Fellow, a Scripps Howard New Media Fellow at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, a Visual Journalism Fellow at the Poynter Institute for New Media and a Western Knight Fellow at USC’s Annenberg College of Communications for Specialized Journalism on Entertainment Journalism in the Digital Age. She is the recipient of the 2022 Prospect Muse Award, Asian American Journalists Association 2001 National Award for New Media and the Organization of Chinese Americans 2000 Chinese American Journalist Award. Avenue Magazine named her one of the “One Hundred Most Influential Asian Americans” in 1997. She is featured in Joann Faung Jean Lee’s book “Asian American actors: oral histories from stage, screen, and television”.

Selections of Lia Chang’s archive of Asian Pacific Americans are now in the Lia Chang Theater Portfolio in the APA Performing Arts Archives housed in the Library of Congress Asian Division’s Asian American Pacific Islander Collection. The historical importance of these rehearsal photographs is in its documentation of Asian American theater in a working and evolving environment. The camera captures the spontaneous interactions among actors, playwright, stage director, choreographer, producer, and musicians before opening night.

Portraits from Lia’s Asian American Pioneer Series are published in Chinese Americans: The Immigrant Experience by Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic (Filmmaker Ang Lee, Playwright David Henry Hwang, Fashion Designers Yeohlee and David Chu, Author Maxine Hong Kingston, Reporter Ti-Hua Chang). Her portraits of notable Chinese Americans have been on view at CAM in Los Angeles (Playwright David Henry Hwang); the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York (author C.Y. Lee, Bill Lann Lee and Gary and Mona Lee Locke); the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA) in San Francisco (Portraits of New York Chinatown after 9/11) and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles (author and activist Michi Weglyn).

Chang’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Angel Island Immigration Station, Asian American Federation of New York, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation Art Collection and the New York Historical Society.

For Lia’s full list of awards, fellowships and published works, click here.