May 23, 2025

Chi Tian and Angela (Elle) Liu won a 2025 AAJA Award for Student Excellence in Video Storytelling

NYU Journalism alumni Chi Tian (Class of 2025) and Angela (Elle) Liu’s (Class of 2024) video story “Saving Chinatown’s roots: How three residents are preserving the neighborhood” — produced in Prof. Jason Samuels’s Advanced Multimedia course and published in amNewYork— won a 2025 Asian American Journalists Association Award for Student Excellence in Video Storytelling.

Chi Tian is a documentary filmmaker based in New York. Born in China and raised across continents, she developed a lens attuned to in-between spaces and quiet transformations. Blending documentary with an eye shaped by anthropology, Chi explores new frontiers of storytelling, becoming a medium of presence through which unseen lives come into view. Her documentary, Dear Friend, Where Do You Come From? 朋友你从哪里来?—A story about a Ukrainian family’s liminal life in China—will premiere in May 2025.

Elle Liu is a freelance multimedia reporter, audio producer and writer based in New York. She is interested in local, character-driven stories about culture, community and the arts. Her work has been published in the Toronto Star, amNY, Washington Square News, and West 10th literary magazine. Elle was a copyeditor at WSN, new editor at WNYU 98.1FM and audio/video producer of the Think About It podcast. She is currently the assistant program manager at the New York Institute for the Humanities.