PROFILE

Crystal Kwok is an award-winning filmmaker who established her career in Hong Kong as an actress, writer, director, and controversial talk show host. Her debut feature film, The Mistress (1999), won the Audience Choice Awards at the Deauville Asiatic Film Festival. Her feature documentary Blurring the Color Line (2022) streamed nationally on PBS under America ReFramed in 2023. It won multiple awards including Best Documentary at the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific Film Festival, Courage Award at DisOrient Film Festival, and the Mira Nair Rising Female Filmmaker Award at the Harlem International Film Festival. Kwok also holds a PhD in Performance Studies and an advanced Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She straddles the line between creative production and academic work. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong in the MALCS, Gender Studies, and History Department. Her work is committed to amplifying voices of women and marginal communities.

https://www.crystalkwok.info/

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Film, Media, Theater, Performance Studies
• Transpacific Feminism
• Gender, Sexuality, and the Body
• Memory, Oral history, Embodiment

PUBLICATIONS (Selected)

Book/Film

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

Journal Articles

Kwok, Crystal. “Afro-Asian Intimacies: Cross Pollination and the Persistence of Anti-Blackness in Chinese Culture”. Genealogy 2024, Volume 8 Issue 2, 44

Conference Presentations

AAS-in-Asia 2026, Lahore, Pakistan, “Episodes of Embodiment: Women’s Lives and Labor from Honolulu to Shanghai”

AAS-in-Asia 2024, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. “Migrations South to South, Diasporas Coast to Coast, Debunking and Prebunking Narratives and Discourses on Global Asian Mobilities”

AAAS 2024, Seattle, WA. “Misfit Narratives: On (Not) Belonging in Asian American Studies”

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

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

City Contemporary Dance Company HK, Board member

COURSES TAUGHT

• CLIT 7013: Postmodernism, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
• CLIT 7006: Fabrications of Identity, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU