ACC mourns the passing of pioneering Asian American documentary filmmaker, esteemed educator, and social justice advocate, Christine Choy on December 7, 2025, at the age of 73.  

Born in Shanghai to a Korean father and Chinese mother, Choy moved to New York City at 14. There she became involved with the Black Panther Party and local activism. While attending Manhattanville College she joined the Newsreel, later Third World Newsreel, an activist filmmaker collective that produced and distributed films highlighting key social movements of the late 1960s. She directed documentaries on the 1971 Attica prison uprising (“Teach Our Children”), the lives and inhumane conditions of women’s prisons (“Inside Women Inside”), the growing activism and organizing of 1970s New York Chinatown (“From Spikes to Spindles”) and other social issues. 

Choy was trained as an architect, receiving her Master of Science degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. She then studied at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles where she earned a Directing Certificate. Over the course of her career, she received more than 60 international awards including a Peabody Award and an Academy Award Nomination for the documentary film, "Who Killed Vincent Chen?" (1987), alongside her co-director Renee Tajima-Peña. The film remains a project for which Choy is well-known for and is about a high-profile hate crime against Asian American Vincent Chin and became a staple of cinema studies courses. In 2021, the film was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for its cultural significance. 

Choy was awarded an ACC grant in 1997 under the Film/Video/Photography discipline to travel from the U.S. to Mainland China to undertake a teaching residency at the Beijing Film Academy and develop new work. Our sincere condolences to Choy's family and loved ones. To learn more about Choy's life, click here