Ning Ying is a renowned Chinese director, screenwriter, and producer based in Beijing, distinguished as "China's premiere woman director" by Harvard's Nieman Reports and referred to as "one of her country's major talents" by Peter Keough from The Boston Phoenix.
Born in Beijing, Ning Ying graduated from the Beijing Film Academy and later from Italy's National Film School, where she befriended Bernardo Bertolucci, who later hired her as an assistant director for his film THE LAST EMPEROR. She completed a fellowship at Harvard University and was awarded the Order of the Star of Italy for her excellence in the arts. The Peace Women Across the Globe Association nominated her among 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ning Ying's career in filmmaking began in 1990 with the comedy blockbuster SOMEONE LOVES JUST ME, followed by her internationally acclaimed "Beijing Trilogy": FOR FUN/1992, ON THE BEAT/1995, and I LOVE BEIJING/2000. Her "Beijing Trilogy" represents "both a historical document of the transformation of the filmmaker's native city and her cinematic eulogy to a form of life that is rapidly vanishing" and received many prestigious international awards, making her a pioneer of Chinese urban cinema.
In 2002, her film RAILROAD OF HOPE won first prize at the Cinema du Reel in Paris, with Jean Michael Frodon writing that her cinema "foreshadows the urban minimalist fictions that represent the most meaningful advances of the next generation of Chinese cinema d'auteur."
