Anita Chang is an artist who works with various media forms, including film, digital video, photography, installation and the web. She was born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan in the 1960’s, fleeing a dictatorship. She grew up in Akron, Ohio and Massachusetts. Chang received her BA in American Studies and English at Tufts University, an MFA in Cinema at San Francisco State University and her doctorate in Film and Digital Media from University of California at Santa Cruz. She has worked as a community activist, an urban youth counselor, civil rights investigator, and education director for a non-profit San Francisco-based media literacy organization.

She has attended artist residencies in Nepal, Headlands Center for the Arts, Taipei Artist Village, and Hweilan International Artists’ Workshop. In pushing the boundaries of the moving image medium, she is always discovering ways to experiment with content and form, inspiring an active viewing experience. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Grant, National Geographic All Roads Grant, Fulbright Lecturing Award, Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, Serpent Source Grant, Open Meadows Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, KQED/Peter J. Owens Filmmaker Award, Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center Grant, Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowship, and an Asian American Arts Foundation Grant.

Her essays have published in American Quarterly, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, positions: asia critique, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies and Taiwan Journal of Indigenous Studies. Her essay “Altered States for a Critical Cosmopolitanism” was published in 2016 as part of Routledge’s AFI Film Readers series book, Teaching Transnational Cinema and Media: Politics and Pedagogy.

Chang has taught film/video production in community-based organizations such as the San Francisco Conservation Corp, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Film Arts Foundation, including its STAND Mentorship program for first-time directors from under-represented backgrounds. She has taught abroad at the Academy of Audio Visual Arts & Sciences in Kathmandu, National Taiwan University of Arts as a Fulbright Scholar, and in the Department of Indigenous Languages and Communication at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan. She also taught critical media studies and production courses at SFSU, USF and UC Santa Cruz, and is currently teaching in the Department of Communication at Cal State East Bay.