Linghua (Lily) Qi is a Chicago-based filmmaker with a passion for visual storytelling that reflects human interests and social issues.
Her writings have appeared in various publications including Google/Pop-Up Magazine, Civil Eats, and Nikkei Asia. Her Civil Eats story on food colonialism was selected as “The Five Best Ideas of the Day” by the Aspen Institute. The reporting series she worked on at City Bureau is a finalist for the Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism in 2020.
She started her documentary filmmaking journey at Kartemquin Educational Films. Her short documentary, Whispers In the Dark, is an official selection for the 2020 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival. She has assisted projects for BBC, CNBC, WORLD Channel/Asian American Documentary Network, Belt Magazine, Global Citizen, and AARP-Chicago, among others. Lily is a former fellow at Free Spirit Media and City Bureau, a grantee of Prism Photo Workshop, and a semi-finalist for the 2022 Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellowship.
In her free time, Lily is an amateur fencer and an enthusiastic library goer.
MEMBERSHIP
Asian American Journalists Association, The Video Consortium, Asian American Documentary Network, Alliance of Documentary Editors, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Chinese Storytellers, Mezcla Media Collective
Lily is fluent in both English and Mandarin, and understands conversational Japanese and Cantonese.