Xinyan Yu, National Fellow, is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Yu began her journalism career in 2012 working as a producer for BBC News in Beijing covering the Asia-Pacific region. In 2018, she moved to New York to launch the North America video team for Hong Kongʼs flagship newspaper South China Morning Post as its senior video producer. She returned to BBC News in 2020 as a senior video journalist reporting on the United States and producing its weekly news show Cut Through the Noise from Washington D.C. Xinyan’s BBC documentary, China’s Science Revolution won the 2015 BBC Storytelling Fund and was Highly Commended for Excellent Online Production at the 2016 Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) Awards. Her 15-min short film for South China Morning Post, Fighting Fentanyl: the Drug from China Destroying American Lives, won the Gold Prize for Best Use of Online Video at the 2019 World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Asian Digital Media Awards. Her BBC News video feature, Are America's unvaccinated changing their minds? won a White House News Photographers Association Eyes of History Digital Storytelling award in 2022. Yu is a Firelight Media Doc Lab fellow, and a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Asian American Documentary Network, Video Consortium and the Documentary Cinematographer Alliance.
Selected Work
- Cannabis: America’s Green Gold Rush: A BBC News feature about the boom and bust of a hemp empire on the Navajo Nation.
- Fighting Fentanyl: The Drug from China Destroying American Lives: A short film about the Last Stop, a community rehab center in Philadelphia that has been helping people fight their opioid addiction, for the South China Morning Post.
- China’s Science Revolution: A documentary and multimedia story for BBC News about China's advancement in science and technology.
- Inside the Lives of Asian Massage Workers: ‘How Can We Not Be Scared?’: A BBC News feature about two female Asian massage workers who spoke up about the stigma surrounding their profession following the Atlanta shooting.
- Are America’s Unvaccinated Changing Their Minds?: A BBC News segment about how coronavirus infection rates surged in U.S. states with low vaccination rates.