yinan wang
王一男
I was born and raised in Beijing, where my filmmaking began through experimental ethnographic work grounded in observation and immersion. After relocating to the United States, I continued this practice in Milwaukee where I currently teach at the Peck School of the Arts and Philadelphia—two cities whose contrasts deepened my sense of identity, displacement, and belonging.
My work moves through the in-between, where cultures meet, blur, and resist one another. I turn to humor, rituals, and silences as quiet sites of meaning. Through moving images, I trace how memory, language, and food shape our sense of home, following the shifting contours of cultural identity shaped as much by migration as by longing.
Composed of cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, my recent work 甜腻腻 Thick & Sweet rebuilds personal and collective memory while probing the flattened portrayals of Asian American representation. Across these works, I seek stories that unfold beyond traditional narratives—centering labor, craft, and materiality, and weaving them with personal history to form an emotional ethnography of the immigrant experience.
My work has been presented in community programs, classrooms, and international venues, and has received recognition including the Cream City Cinema Jury Award and the Sikay Tang Critical Lens Award, with support from the Brico Forward Fund and the Harry L. Friedberg Award. I have also been a fellow with the University Film and Video Association, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship.