Ruby CHEN, the Co-founder and CEO of CNEX. She is not only a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a jury member for the Oscar Documentary Selection, but she also teaches at the School of Film Art in the China Academy of Art. Ruby is passionate about nurturing documentary filmmakers and supporting the Chinese documentary industry globally.

She has served as an executive producer and creative producer for numerous films, including Island in Between, nominated for the 96th Oscar’s Best Documentary Shot, and the award winning domentary 1428, which received the Best Documentary Award at the Orizzonti of the Venice Film Festival; Other notable films she has worked on include the Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary: KJ: Music and Life, Hip Hop Storm, The Chinese Mayor; A Young Patriot (which won the Hong Kong International Film Festival Jury Award); Tough Out (which won Best Documentary at the FIRST Film Festival), and Four Journeys (which opened the IDFA Film Festival).

CNEX’s co-founder and the Director of the Production Department. He has participated in the developing, production, and directing of over 50 documentaries, TV documentaries, and factual films. His notable works include 1879-1942 THE NONCONFORMIST CHEN DYXIU (2012), THE ROCKING SKY (2015), Season 2 Chief Director of TRANSMITTERS OF HERITAGE (2017), and Chief Director of GIVING CYCLES (2018). In 2020, he completed the documentary “The Original Face” about MASTER SHENG YEN. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a jury member for the Oscar Documentary Selection.

Shihui (Shirley) is the CCO & Partner at CNEX. Prior to joining CNEX, she worked for CCTV, BBC and Phoenix TV as journalist and producer. She also worked as SVP at independent production companies like LIC & 3C Media. At the forefront of producing both documentaries and entertainment shows, her works

includes: Puyi – The Last Emperor of China, Winner of Gold Plaque, History/Biography Category, Chicago Film Festivals Hugo Awards; Interview Before Execution, public screening film in 2012 IDFA & 2012 Rome Film Festival, and many factual entertainment series on prime-time satellite TV & major streaming platforms. Titles include The Letters on CCTV1; Master Class S1-4 on Beijing Satellite TV; Let’ s Go Time Traveller S1-4 on Sichuan Satellite TV & Bilibili; Searching for Youth on Youku.

Yulan CHANG is a passionate advocate for documentary filmmaking and currently serves as Director of CNEX Chinese Doc Forum (CCDF). She oversees CCDF, which is a prominent platform for documentary professionals in the Chinese diaspora. Previously, Yulan was the Producer of Production and Development at National Geographic, where she was responsible for overseeing original productions in Taiwan and China. Yulan began her career by producing and directing shows for both National Geographic and Discovery Asia, establishing herself as a visionary in documentary storytelling. She is deeply committed to supporting emerging talent and promoting the art of documentary filmmaking.

Bryan CHANG is an Emmy-nominated Taiwanese American filmmaker, known for his work on socially and politically engaged documentary films. His films have been featured by prominent outlets such as The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Atlantic, and PBS, and have premiered at major festivals including Sundance Film Festival.

His feature length documentaries include Brasslands (director), Narco Cultura (editor), and Island Soldier (producer/editor). He was a director for the Emmy-nominated series Sesame Street in Communities – Talking About Race, and an editor on Oscar-shortlisted feature documentary Dark Money. Most recently, he has directed several episodes of the Peabody Award-winning PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century, and edited the premiere episode of the PBS series hosted by Henry Louis GATES, Making Black America. As an editor, his two recent feature films She Runs the World and The Travel Companion had their world premieres at Tribeca Festival in 2025.

Bryan is a proud member of Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, A-Doc, and has been named to DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list. He is a founding member of Meerkat Media, a cooperative film production company based Brooklyn, New York.

Miao WANG (director, producer, editor) is a Beijing-born New York-based filmmaker. Proudly bicultural and bilingual, she has a sensitive and fine-tuned appreciation of cultural nuances. Her focus is on creative and cinematic films that tell poignant human stories, inspire cultural understanding, build connections, and encourage a more humanistic perspective of the world. She holds a BA in economics from the University of Chicago, and an MFA in design and film from Parsons School of Design. She apprenticed with two mentors while completing her MFA: renowned graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister and the legendary documentarian Albert Maysles. Design sharpened her eyes to visual detail and how colors, textures, and patterns affect us. Maysles taught her how to be perceptive to people’s gestures and emotions, however subtle. Both became models when she founded Three Waters Films in 2005. She has directed and produced three documentary features, Admissions Granted (MSNBC Films), Maineland (SXSW Jury Award Winner, New York Times Critic’s Pick), Beijing Taxi (New York Magazine Critic’s Pick), and short films Made by China in America and Yellow Ox Mountain. Her films have screened at hundreds of international festivals and institutions such as SXSW and the Guggenheim Museum, with US theatrical releases, nationwide broadcasts, and digitally released globally on multiple platforms. Miao is a recipient of grants and fellowships from Impact Partners, the Sundance Institute, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the Tribeca Film Institute, and Women Make Movies. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

PENG Wen-lan is an independent producer/director based in London. She began her television career in the 1980s as a producer/presenter of English language programmes on China Central Television and later went on to present and executive produce Focus in the 1980s, CCTV’s first current affairs programme and the precursor of its present flagship programme Jiaodian Fangtan.

Upon returning to the UK in the late 80’s, Wenlan joined the Central Office for Information (the media department of the UK government) as series producer of UK Today, which gained the Finalist Award in the 1991 New York Film Festival. She subsequently worked for the BBC and the independent sector as producer/director on several documentaries about China, including China Rising, a three-part series on contemporary Chinese history (ITV); Hidden Empire, a series of docu-dramas covering Britain’s imperial past (BBC2); China Close-Up, a series on Shanghai (BBC2).

Her docu-drama A Family Concern, about the founder of the Shell Company, won the Gold Camera Award for Best History Documentary at the 1998 US International Film & Video Festival. Wenlan is a trainer for the BBC as well as EU and British Council funded workshops. She runs her own production company, Sinoscope, making documentaries on China and line producing television and feature film projects for Chinese companies filming in Britain, such as The Opium War by eminent director XIE Jin; drama serial Sun Yat-Sen (CCTV); and The Rise of Nations, a highly acclaimed 12-part documentary series charting the development of the West (CCTV).

Violet is an Emmy-winning independent documentarian, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2024 Chicken and Egg Awardee. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and an adjunct professor at the Journalism School of Columbia University. Violet directed and produced The Dating Game, which premiered at 2025 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Competition and won the Best International Director at Doc Edge Film Festival. The film has been widely acclaimed throughout over 20 film festivals around the world. She directed and produced the 2023 Oscar Shortlisted, Peabody and Emmy nominated Hidden Letters which premiered incompetition at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, followed by twelve international festival awards and broadcast distributions in more than 15 countries. She directed PBS/CPB special program Harbor from the Holocaust with music performed by Yo-Yo Ma.

She has directed, produced, and executive produced 13 documentaries. Her producing credits include Night of Night (2024), which premiered in competition at CPH:DOX; Dear Mother, I Meant to Write About Death (2022), which received a Special Mention at Busan International Film Festival; Singing in the Wilderness (2021), a nominee for the Golden Alexander Award at Thessaloniki International Film Festival; Confucian Dream (2019), winner of a Special Jury Award at Karlovy Vary International Festival and the Chinese Academy Award of Documentary Film; Mainland (2017), winner of a Special Jury Award at SXSW and Please Remember Me (2015), winner of three awards at GZDocs with a successful theatrical release and impact campaign in China that resulted in policy changes. The film was awarded DocImpactHi5 of 2019.

Violet started her career as a co-producer on the critically acclaimed 2007 Sundance Special Jury winner Peabody and Emmy winner Nanking, which was distributed theatrically around 30 countries throughout the world, and was the highest-grossing documentary in China. Violet produces the forthcoming film Running With the Prime Minister. Violet has served as advisor for Sundance Non-Fiction Producing Lab, Hot Docs Blue Ice Docs Fund and Chicken and Egg (Egg)ccelerated Lab. She is a consulting programmer for Shanghai International Film Festival.

Born in Shanghai and based in New York, Violet holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Fudan University and received her MFA in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley.

S. Leo CHIANG is a filmmaker based in Taipei & San Francisco. His short documentary, Island in Between, received an Oscar nomination in 2024. His previous feature doc, Our Time Machine, was nominated for an Emmy & a Gotham Award, and won awards at a dozen international film festivals. He directed two episodes of the landmark 5-part PBS series, Asian Americans, which won a Peabody Award in 2021. His other films include the Emmy-nominated A Village Called Versailles. Leo co-founded A-Doc, the Asian American Documentary Network, and is a documentary branch member of the Academy.

Fan WU is the Producer of Mirror Doc, a documentary short programme of Mirror TV. Prior to that she was the Programmer of TIDF (Taiwan International Documentary Festival), the Director of CCDF (CNEX Chinese Doc Forum), the Festival Director of CNEX Documentary Film Festival. Born in Taipei, studied Motion Picture at National Taiwan University of Arts, and then received an MSc degree in Festival Producing and Management from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and a MA degree in Documentary by Practice from Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Elvis A-Liang LU has a M.A. from the Department of Motion Picture at the Taiwan National University of Arts. Being passionate about documentary, he is a freelance filmmaker by profession and earns a living as a handyman in the industry. He works primarily on topics pertinent to personal dilemmas and their expression. In recent years, he focused on the exploration of religion and gender. His feature-length film The Shepherds won the Best Documentary in Golden Harvest Awards and “Euro Kino” Czech International Independent Film Festival. It was also nominated for Best Documentary at Taipei Film Festival. His film A Holy Family was selected for International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Réel and was nominated for Best Documentary and Best Editing at the 2022 Golden Horse Awards. It won the Grand Prize, Audience Choice Award, Best Documentary, and Best Editing at the 2022 Taipei Film Festival.

Gary KAM is a documentary filmmaker based in Seoul, Korea and is committed to crafting compelling stories and championing independent documentary makers. His work includes Planet of Snail (2011, Best Feature-Length Documentary, IDFA), the OSCAR®-nominated In the Absence (2018), Shadow Flowers (2019, Best Korean Documentary/DMZ Int’l Film Fest, Grand Prize/TIDF & FIDBA), Crossing Beyond, the official Olympic film for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and The Red Herring (2022), which drew an audience of 330,000 in Korea. 

He has served as a documentary mentor at the Berlinale Doc Station, the Docedge Kolkata, the DMZ Int’l Documentary Festival, Docs By the Sea, EBS Int’l Doc Fest and as a juror/selection committee at The Whickers Foundation, IDFA Forum and IDA. Gary is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Laura NIX is an Oscar- and Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning director, writer and producer whose films include the recent Democracy Under Siege, the short documentary Walk Run Cha-Cha, feature documentaries such as Delikado, Inventing Tomorrow, The Light in Her Eyes, and The Yes Men Are Revolting, as well as the fiction feature The Politics of Fur, among others. 

Her films have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, Berlinale, and IDFA film festivals, and have been released theatrically and on television in the US and multiple international territories via HBO, Arte, ZDF, VPRO, CBC, NHK, Canal+, and IFC, etc. 

She has won several awards including the 2017 Sundance Discovery Impact award and the 2018 Chicken & Egg award, honoring excellence in women documentary directors. Nix received her Bachelor’s degree in History from Reed College, and her MFA in Visual Arts from University of California San Diego. Based in Los Angeles, she’s a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where she serves on the executive committee of the documentary branch. 

I worked for over forty years in documentary television, the past twenty of which almost exclusively in Asia – variously in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and China. I divided my time between producing original productions, re-versioning other people’s programs and, of course, training. Over the years I have worn many hats – researcher, development producer, producer, executive producer, scriptwriter, script doctor and, the one that has given me the greatest satisfaction, trainer.

I started making documentary films in 1983. In 1986, I was a member of the first Western documentary crew allowed to film in Inner Mongolia. Since then I have made or re-versioned over forty documentary programs in Asia including Inside The Forbidden City (National Geographic Channels International – voted No.1 series in a 2009 viewer’s poll), The History of Beijing (BBC WorldWide), Kung Fu Dragons of Mt Wudang (NGCI, Bronze Medal NY Film and Television Festival), China’s Space Hero (Discovery Asia – “Highly Commended”, Asia Television Awards), Hip Korea: Rain (Discovery Asia, Finalist, Asia Television Awards), Hip Korea: Kim Yuna (Discovery Asia, winner Best Editing, ATA 2010, runner-up Best Direction plus two other categories). Original award-winning productions at LIC include The Flying Tigers, China’s Golden Monkeys, The Blind Monkey, China’s Swan Lake, and The Last Little Train in China among others. Recent projects include international co-productions with European broadcasters about Tides (Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland), Bridges (Germany) and Sheep (Germany). Although most of my work in Asia has been in the “specialist factual” genre, I also work on creative/feature docs. I was, for example, a co- producer and scriptwriter on the International Emmy-winning No Burqas Behind Bars.

When not developing or working on documentaries I find fulfilment in participating in various training programs around the world. I have been a trainer at IDFA, IDFA Academy, Hot Docs, Sunny Side, Greenhouse, the Baltic Forum, the Dragon Forum, as well as several training initiatives in South Korea, Japan and Singapore. For many years the closest to my heart was Crossing Borders (a longitudinal training program that brought together filmmakers from Asia and Europe) of which I was Head of Studies for seven years.

Pat FERNS is President of Ferns Productions. He has produced some of Canada’s finest award-winning programming and the world’s leading media events. Having launched public pitching at the Banff Television Festival in 1985, Pat has presented his signature pitching sessions worldwide on five continents. He is the overall organizer of the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum in Taiwan, now in its sixteenth year. In 2000 he was the fifth recipient of the prestigious Academy of Canadian Film and Television’s Achievement Award for “exceptional contribution to the Canadian television industry.” In 2005 he was awarded The Order of Canada for his services to the industry. Pat, a first-time author, has recently completed writing his memoirs entitled The Big Picture: A Personal History of Independent Television Production in Canada. He lives in Shirley, B.C. on Vancouver Island.