Siyi Chen

Siyi Chen (she/her) is a documentary director and editor based in New York City. She studied World History and Chinese Literature at Peking University before earning an MA in News and Documentary from NYU. After two meaningful years as a video journalist, she transitioned to long-form documentary filmmaking. Her debut feature Dear Mother, I Meant to Write About Death premiered at Busan International Film Festival in 2022, earning a special mention in the Wide Angle Documentary Competition. The film also screened at IDFA 2022 and was nominated for the Best First Feature Award. It received support from the IDFA Bertha Fund, Chicken & Egg Accelerator Lab, SFFILM, and the Asian Cinema Fund. Siyi has won the SFFILM New American Fellowship and was an artist-in-residence at the Jacob Burns Film Center. In 2023, she was selected for PBS’s Ignite Mentorship for Diverse Voices. Her editing work includes Made in Ethiopia (2024), which premiered at Tribeca. Siyi’s films often explore themes of migration, identity, and family, with a poetic approach to portraying women in the diaspora. When not making films, she writes poetry in both Mandarin and English.

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