Talk

MFA Photography, Video & Related Media presents a discussion with award-winning filmmaker Nanfu Wang and critic and faculty member Amy Taubin. Nanfu Wang is an award-winning Chinese filmmaker based in the United States. Wang directed and produced the feature documentaries Hooligan Sparrow (Sundance 2016), I Am Another You (SXSW 2017, Special Jury Prize winner), One Child Nation (Sundance 2019, Grand Jury Prize Winner, Amazon) and In the Same Breath (Sundance 2021, HBO). Her films have been shortlisted for three Oscars, received four Emmy nominations, one DGA nomination, two Independent Spirits Awards nominations, and two PGA nominations among other awards. She is also a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Most recently, Wang directed and executive produced Mind Over Murder, a six-episode documentary series for HBO. 

A film and cultural critic for more than 40 years, faculty member Amy Taubin is a contributing editor for Artforum. She began writing about film at the Soho Weekly News, then moved to the Village Voice, where she wrote about movies and television from 1984 to 2001. She was a contributing editor for Film Comment for 20 years and also for Sight and Sound. Her writing has also appeared in Millennium Film Journal, the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Variety, Film Culture and many other publications. She often writes liner notes for the Criterion collection and appears there in video conversations with Mike Leigh and Jane Campion. Her monograph Taxi Driver was published in 2000 in the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series and she is the co-author of James Nares (Rizzoli, 2014.) Her critical essays and interviews are included in many collections, including Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank published by Scalo.

She is a recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant through Creative Capital and is currently writing an extended essay on David Cronenberg for that organization’s Cookie Jar series.She’s a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the New York FilmCritics Circle. In 2003, she received the School of Visual Arts’ art historian teaching award and in 2007, the Anthology Film Archives Logos-Siegfried Kracauer Award. She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. from N.Y.U. in cinema studies.

She began her professional life as an actor on Broadway and off Broadway, and was at the same time involved in avant-garde film, first as a performer and then as a critic.