Betty Yu

Socially engaged multimedia artist Betty Yu’s artistic practice integrates documentary film and new media platforms with community-infused activism and education. Born and raised in New York City to Chinese Immigrant parents, Yu co-founded Chinatown Art Brigade in 2015, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Her documentary Resilience, about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions, screened at national and international film festivals, including the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Yu’s multi-media installation The Garment Worker was featured at Tribeca Film Institute's Interactive Showcase. Betty earned her MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College, where she has also taught as an adjunct faculty member.

In 2016 she received the SOAPBOX Artist Award from the Laundromat Project, and won the 2017 Aronson Journalism for Social Justice Award for her film Three Tours, about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq. Yu had her curatorial debut in 2020, presenting “Imagining De-Gentrified Futures,” an exhibition featuring artists of color, activists, and others, along with her own work, at Apex Art in Tribeca.

She has exhibited work at the Brooklyn Museum, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, No Longer Empty, Old Stone House, SPACE Gallery, Open Source, and BRIC Arts. Yu is an adjunct assistant professor, teaching new media, film theory, art, and video production at New York institutions including the New School, John Jay College, Pratt Institute, Marymount Manhattan College and Hunter College.