Linghua (Lily) Qi (she/her) is a Chicago-based filmmaker dedicated to amplifying voices from the Midwest, with a passion for visual storytelling that explores the depth of human experience and reflects social issues that shape our communities.

She is a 2026 Interfaith America Innovation Fellow, a 2024 Center for Asian American Media Fellow, a 2020 Prism Photo Workshop grantee, and a 2020 Free Spirit Media and City Bureau fellow.

She produced and co-wrote Allison Walsh’s debut feature documentary, ALL OF THE ABOVE, which premiered at the 2026 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and it is currently in the festival circuit across the country. With the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc), she curates and produces micro and short documentaries centered on the Asian American experience and community-driven stories, as one of the co-leads of the storytelling initiative. She has worked on the Emmy-nominated, award-winning docuseries ASIAN AMERICAN RESILIENCE AND BEYOND, co-produced by WORLD Channel and the Asian American Documentary Network. Most recently, she co-produced the OUR STORIES, OUR VOICES series, which premiered at the 2024 CAAMFest and went on to screen at the 2024 New Orleans Film Festival and the 2025 William and Louise Greaves Filmmaker Seminar.

She has worked on visual projects for the BBC, CNBC, Belt Magazine, Global Citizen, AARP, among others. Her work has been recognized and supported by CAAM, Illinois Arts Council, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), Interfaith America, and many others. The reporting series she worked on at City Bureau was a finalist for the Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism in 2020.

In her free time, she is an amateur sabre fencer and an enthusiastic library goer.

Lily is fluent in English and Mandarin, and understand conversational Japanese and Cantonese.