Alice Wu (δΌζθ) is a Chinese American film director and screenwriter.
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Alice Wu was born on April 21, 1970 and raised in San Jose, California, then moved to Los Altos, California where she graduated from Los Altos High School at the age of 16. In 1990, she received her B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Two years later, she completed her Master's degree in Computer Science at Stanford. Before becoming a filmmaker, Wu worked as a software engineer for Microsoft in Seattle. She then left the corporate world to pursue a filmmaking career full time.[1]
Wu pursued a career in computer science, but began writing a novel while working at Microsoft. Deciding the story would work better as a film, she signed up for a screenwriting class, in which she penned the feature script Saving Face. Encouraged by her screenwriting teacher, she left Microsoft in the late 1990s to try to turn the script into a film, giving herself a five-year window. Production had begun when she reached the fifth year.[1]
Alice Wu's most noted work is the 2005 Saving Face. It was inspired by her own experiences coming out as a lesbian in the Chinese American community. She worked a film based on Rachel DeWoskin's memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. However, the movie never made it past pre-production and the project is now canceled. In 2001, the script for Saving Face won the CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) screenwriting award.