Alice Wu

Alice Wu (伍思薇) is a Chinese American film director and screenwriter.

Personal life

Alice Wu was born on April 21, 1970 and raised in San Jose, California, eventually moving to Los Altos, California where she graduated from Los Altos High School at the age of 16. She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1990, and her master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford in 1992. 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]

Career

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 2004 Saving Face. It was inspired by her own experiences coming out as a lesbian in the Chinese American community. She worked on 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 Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment screenwriting award.

External links

• Alice Wu on IMDb
• Interview with Saving Face's Alice Wu and Joan Chen, at AfterEllen.com

References