2024-2026
Canada/China
Daphne Xu (Canada/China) is an artist and filmmaker born in 1992. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Brown University (2014) and a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from MIT (2019). She began making films in 2018 as a Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University, where she is an affiliate of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Her films are concerned with the interior lives of women and diasporic subjects caught in moments of rapid development, seeking associative meaning over anthropological explanation. Her films have premiered at festivals and institutions including Toronto International Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, and Visions du Réel, winning the Short Film Award from Cinéma du Réel in 2025 for Notes of a Crocodile. She is a previous recipient of grants, residencies, and fellowships through the Hubert Bals Fund, the Music Gallery, the Flaherty Seminar, the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), and other institutions. She has presented talks and lectures at venues including Concordia University, CalArts, and the University of Heidelberg. Her films are in the collections of the Asia Art Archives in Hong Kong and the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives and works between Toronto, New York, and Shanghai.
“Xu’s exploration of the politics and poetics of place draws on her background in urban planning; her earliest projects pertain to Xiongan, a rural area in China’s Hebei province designated for development into a megacity. Xu’s films are keenly attuned to the movement of bodies in liminal spaces, from the local residents and migrant workers at rapidly shifting sites in Xiongan to the nocturnal souls who gather around New York City’s Seward Park”. —MoMA