Grace Lee

Lecturer
Personal Documentary

MFA, University of California, Los Angeles

Grace Lee is a writer/director of both fiction and non-fiction films. Her feature film AMERICAN ZOMBIE premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, went on to screen at festivals such as SXSW, Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, and was released by Cinema Libre in 2008. Prior to that, she directed THE GRACE LEE PROJECT, a feature documentary that was hailed by Variety as “a funny, complex meditation on identity and cultural expectations,” and “ridiculously entertaining” by New York Magazine. The film opened theatrically in several cities after a successful festival run (SXSW, LA Film Festival, Pusan, True/False) and was broadcast on Sundance Channel.

Grace received her MFA in Directing from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, where her thesis film BARRIER DEVICE, starring Sandra Oh and Suzy Nakamura, won multiple awards, including a Student Academy Award and Directors Guild of America Student award, screened in dozens of festivals, aired on Sundance Channel, and is distributed on Itunes through Shorts International. She is the recipient of the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Digital Media, a Rockefeller Media Arts grant, the PPP Pusan Prize (at the Pusan International Film Festival) for her script SMELLS LIKE BUTTER, as well as funding from the Center for Asian American Media, UCLA Institute for American Cultures and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other documentary credits include BEST OF THE WURST, which was funded by the Filmboard Berlin Brandenberg and premiered at the Berlinale Talent Campus and CAMP ARIRANG, a short documentary about prostitution around U.S. military bases in South Korea (distributed by Third World Newsreel).

Grace is currently in production on a feature documentary AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY about 94-year-old Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, whose personal biography encompasses the major radical social movements of the last century in the U.S. She is also developing several fiction projects. In addition to making films, Grace has taught production courses at UCLA and at Objectifs Film and Photography Center in Singapore.