Yu, Betty
Office: HN 474
Email: betty.yu@hunter.cuny.edu
Phone: TBA
Website: www.bettyyu.net
Betty Yu is an award-winning filmmaker, socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer and activist born and raised in NYC. Yu integrates documentary film, photography, installation, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice. Betty’s films and multimedia work has focused on labor, immigration, gentrification, abolition, racism, militarism, transgender equality among other issues. She is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-displacement fights. Ms. Yu’s documentary “Resilience” about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions screened at dfilm festivals including the Margaret Mead Film Festival.
Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, NY Historical Society, Museum of the City of NY, Artists Space/ISP Whitney Museum, The Highline, Tenement Museum,, 2019 BRIC Biennial, Apexart, Pace University Art Gallery, Transmitter Gallery, 601 Artspace, Five Myles, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, Bullet Space, Carriage Trade, Old Stone House and MAXXI in Rome. “The Garment Worker”, an interactive installation, was featured at Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive Showcase. Her multimedia installation, “Resistance in Progress”, highlighting housing activism in Flushing was featured at the Queens Museum. Betty had her first solo exhibition, “(Dis)Placed in Sunset Park” at Open Source Gallery. Ms. Yu won the Aronson Social Justice Award for her film “Three Tours” about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq, and their journey to overcome PTSD. Her photography and art college book, Family Amnesia: Chinese American Resilience was released in Summer 2025.
Her work has received coverage in outlets including New York Times, CNN, HBO VICE News Tonight, i-D Vice Media, Art Forum, ARTNews, Sinovision, Hyperallergic, E-Flux, F-Stop Magazine, The Eye of Photography Magazine, La Belle Revue Art Journal & Studio International.
Ms. Yu has been awarded artist residencies and fellowships from The Laundromat Project, A Blade of Grass, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Social Practice CUNY, Intercultural Leadership Institute, Skidmore’s Documentary Storytellers’ Institute, KODA, Asian American Arts Alliance, Pratt Taconic, En Foco, China Residencies, Flux Factory and Santa Fe Art Institute. Yu has received numerous grants for our work including support from Art Matters Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, En Foco, Laundromat Project, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Wave Farm Media Arts, Asian Women Giving Circle, Culture Push, City Artist Corp and the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media. Betty sits on the boards of Third World Newsreel and Working Films; and on the advisory board of More Art.
She holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College/CUNY, and a New Media Narratives certificate from the International Center of Photography. For nearly a decade she has been teaching video, film, new media, social practice, art and activism at universities such as Hunter College. Pratt Institute, John Jay College and The New School. Most recently she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Production at Marymount Manhattan College. She is currently a lecturer and Deputy Director of the Integrated Media Arts MFA Program at Hunter College.
