Alice Wu

Alice Wu is an openly lesbian Chinese-American filmmaker whose output is small but culturally significant. She worked as a software engineer at Microsoft before leaving to make her debut film Saving Face (2004), a warm romantic comedy about a Chinese-American lesbian woman juggling her relationship with a dancer and her mother's unexpected pregnancy — one of the first mainstream American films to center a queer Asian-American protagonist and find genuine crossover success. She did not make another film for sixteen years; The Half of It (2020, Netflix) was a literary teen comedy-drama about a closeted Chinese-American girl ghost-writing love letters for a classmate, which became one of the most celebrated queer coming-of-age films of its year. Wu has spoken candidly about the industry barriers that made it nearly impossible for her to get her second film made.