Manman Yang, documentary filmmaker and curator, born in southwestern China and of Dong minority heritage, earned her MA from the Beijing Film Academy in 2015. Currently based in Manchester, she is the Chevening Scholar of 2024, awarded by the British Council to study visual anthropology in the Granada Center, University of Manchester.

Inspired by the cultural shocks she experienced while living in Europe, she turned to documentary filmmaking to make the invisible visible. She has worked as a content researcher and film developer for the British Science Museum’s SUPERBUGS exhibition in China and produced a documentary for the British Embassy in Beijing on the 2019 Newton Prize for UK-China scientific innovation.

Her short documentary, A Day with Xiaohui, was an official selection at the 2019 Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival (SVAFMF) and screened in Vancouver. Her first feature-length documentary, Some Body to Love, focusing on China’s LGBTQ+ community, won the Jury Award at the SVAFMF pitch session.

In 2019, she integrated visual anthropology into her filmmaking, collaborating with Dr. Jacob R. Hickman on Playing for the Ancestors, a documentary on the Hmong minority in Yunnan. The film was officially selected for the 2020 EASA Film Programme (Lisbon, Portugal) and the 2021 SVAFMF.

Her work explores migrant workers, marginalized groups, cultural identity, place & space, topophilia, visual anthropology, and material heritage.

In 2019, she founded “Believing is Seeing Studio” in Guangzhou, focusing on documentary production and exhibition curation. Since then, her collaborations have spanned various organisations, including the British Embassy, the British Science Museum, and NHK Japan. Her works have been officially selected and screened twice in one of the world’s most influential and longest-running visual anthropology film festivals, SVAFMF, and widely screened on TV and new media platforms.