Cynthia Liu
CV
Education Justice :: Film :: Fiction
Education Justice
Honors & Awards
BlogHer 10 x 10 Community Keynote Speaker, Female entrepreneurship
presentation to 4,000 of
the most tech savvy
women in the country.
BlogHer/HTC
Innovation Award
Digital innovation for a
pioneering civic tech
school funding map tool
using the Google Maps
API.
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Ford Foundation New Media Grant, K12NN
2009 - 2020
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Founded and launched an education & media justice website, K-12 News Network. Featured voices from the rising majority of students, parents, and teachers of color on justice issues experienced in the classroom and wider school/community ecosystem.
2020: white paper for political campaigns on K-12 federal policy; drafted verbiage for Inspector General tied to School Districts to investigate/charge/prosecute corruption & theft of public K-12 funds
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2019: helped pass AB 1505, California's statewide charter school accountability law
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2018 - 2012: fought school privatization in Los Angeles and nationally, by networking grassroots pro-public education groups; covered school strikes
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2015: promoted and practiced "opt out" of punitive school overtesting
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2010: pushed back against "Tiger Mom" author and parenting methods
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Film
Honors & Awards
Project Involve: Film Independent yearlong DEI fellowship to develop woc/poc/lgbtqia+ filmmakers
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Board member, Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment
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Worldfest Houston Bronze Award, Short RomCom
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Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment New Writers Award
ALIEN ABDUCTION, Project Involve culminating short. Japanese American WW II incarceration camps set in UFO territory. Written, produced, directed.
A. EYE FOR THE WHITE GUY; parody of Queer Eye For the Straight Guy makeover short. Written, produced, directed. Screened at 30+ film festivals.
RED THREAD, romcom short film; written, directed, produced; screened at 40+ film festivals.
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Fiction
Honors & Awards
Artists Trust GAP Grant
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Jack Straw New Writers Fellowship
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Seattle Arts & Lectures, Writers in the Schools
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Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize in Short Fiction
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"The Metamorphosis Bud," an intersex retelling of the Kafka story, in Genderflex: Sexy Stories on the Edge and In-Between
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Residencies: Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center
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Academic Writing
Honors & Awards
Ph.D. UC Berkeley, Department of English
Woodrow Wilson Feminist Dissertation Writing Fellowship
Oral examination: passed with distinction
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"When Dragon Ladies Die, Do They Come Back As Butterflies?" in Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, Temple UP, 2000.
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Confusianism and Its Discontents: Chinese American Gender and Sexuality in Literature and Film. Dissertation.
"To Love, Honor, and Dismay": Subverting the Feminine in Ang Lee's Trilogy of Resuscitated Patriarchs," Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism, 3:1, Winter 1995, 1-60.
About
I'm an American-born Chinese woman (she/hers) who comes from a line of Lius that date back seven generations or more in Fuzhou, China. I grew up in the midwest, upstate NY, and suburban DC, but living in Northern and Southern California for a total of more than thirty years truly formed me. It's where my child was born, it's where I walked my parents to the door of the Great Beyond.
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The cities of Oakland and Los Angeles, and a really good taco, will always have a place in my heart.
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Currently I live and write in the bioregion of Cascadia.