Betty Yu

Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, educator and activist born and raised in NYC to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu is a socially engaged multimedia artist integrating documentary film, new media platforms and community-infused approaches into her practice. Her community-based arts projects have fused together video, photography, interactive mapping, new media, installation, augmented reality, 3-D elements and live projections. Ms. Yu’s 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. She worked with housing activists and artists to co-create “People’s Monument to Anti-Displacement Organizing” that was featured in the Agitprop! show at Brooklyn Museum. Betty was a 2012 Public Artist-in-Resident and received the 2016 SOAPBOX Artist Award from Laundromat Project. In 2017, Ms. Yu has been awarded several artist residencies from institutions such as the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Skidmore College’s Documentary Studies Collaborative and SPACE at Ryder Farm. In 2015, Betty co-founded Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Betty won the 2017 Aronson Journalism for Social Justice Award for her film “Three Tours” about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq and their journey to overcome their PTSD. Ms. Yu is a 2017-18 fellow of the Intercultural Leadership Institute. Betty recently had her first solo exhibition, “(DIs)Placed in Sunset Park” at Open Source Gallery in September 2018 in New York City. This work was also included in 2019 BRIC’s Biennial where her project received an honorable mention in the New York Times.

Betty is an adjunct assistant professor teaching new media, social practice art, video production and film studies at various colleges in New York City, including The New School, John Jay College, Pratt Institute, Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College. Ms. Yu’s work has been exhibited, screened and featured at the Directors Guild of America, Brooklyn Museum, The Eastman Kodak Museum, BRIC, International Center of Photography, Tribeca Film Festival, Visual Communications Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival and No Longer Empty’s pop up gallery. Betty is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art for her project with Chinatown Art Brigade. Ms. Yu has received numerous grants for our work including support from Art Matters Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Wave Farm Media Arts and the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media.

Residency/Fellowship

2020 Labor

Website

bettyyu.net

Location

Brooklyn, NY USA