PROFILE

Crystal Kwok holds a PhD in Performance Studies and Women's Studies Advanced Graduate Certificate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Starting out as an actress in the Hong Kong movie industry, Kwok established herself as an award-winning filmmaker and an outspoken talk show host on RTHK Radio 3 and Cable TV. Her debut feature film, The Mistress (1999), won the Audience Choice Awards at the Deauville Asiatic Film Festival. Most recently, her documentary feature, Blurring the Color Line (2022) won multiple awards including Best Documentary at the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Mira Nair Rising Female Filmmaker Award at the Harlem International Film Festival. As a content creator and scholar, Kwok is committed to amplifying the voices of women and marginal communities.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Film, Documentary, and Media
• Gender and Sexuality
• Race-relations and cross-pollinations
• Performance of Memory and History
• Transpacific feminism

PUBLICATIONS (Selected)

Book/Film

Kwok, Crystal. Director, “Blurring the Color Line” (2022), Documentary distributed by Good Docs www.blurringthecolorline.com

Journal Articles

Afro-Asian Intimacies: Cross-Pollination and the Persistence of Anti-Blackness in Chinese Culture
Genealogy, Volume 8, Issue 2 (June 2024) - Link to Article

Conference Presentations

AAAS Seattle 2024: Misfit Narratives: On (Not) Belonging in Asian American Studies

AAS Yogyakarta 2024: Migrations South to South, Diasporas Coast to Coast. Debunking and Pre-bunking Narratives and Discourse on Global Asian Mobilities

National Association of Chinese Americans (2023), “It’s Complicated! Asians in Black and White America”, Carter Center, Atlanta, GA

AAS 2021: “Shame/Shine: Chinese Sluts across Time, Border, and Media”

Interviews

“Crystal Kwok – Perspectives and racial narratives between Chinese and Black communities”, Noreen Mir on RTHK Radio 3, April 22, 2024 https://www.facebook.com/NoreenMirRTHKradio3/videos/1171491880962985

‘I want people to have uncomfortable conversations’: A new documentary explores Chinese and Black relations in the Jim Crow South, The World with Rebecca Kanthor, July 20, 2022 https://theworld.org/stories/2022/07/18/i-want-people-have-uncomfortable-conversations-new-documentary-explores-chinese

“Director Crystal Kwok on Jackie Chan, sex talk and where Asians fitted into segregated US South”, South China Morning Post, April 11, 2019 https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3005726/director-crystal-kwok-jackie-chan-sex-talk-and

Professional Experience

Producer/Director/Screenwriter: The Mistress (1999); Culture Cubs (2007); I Hate Veggies (2012); Blurring the Color Line (2022)

TV/Radio Talk Show Host (Hong Kong): RTHK Radio 3 “Kwoktalk”; “The Sex Crystals”; Cable TV “I am Crystal Kwok” (1997-2015)

Stage/Film Performance: Fertility Goddess (2004); Vagina Monologues (2006); Police Story II (1988); Four Loves (1988); The Master (1992)

COURSES TAUGHT

• CLIT 7013: Postmodernism, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
• CCHU 9097: Queering Art, Performance, and Cities, Common Core, HKU
• HIST 2212: Performing History in the 20th and 21st Century, Department of History
• MEDIART 498: Performing Race, Gender, and the Body in Film, Duke Kunshan University
• WGSS 481: Women and Film, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa