Daphne Xu is an artist and filmmaker who explores the politics and poetics of place. Her works unfurl from cities in flux; they are concerned with the interior lives of women and diasporic subjects caught in moments of rapid modernization. Her films sit between documentary and fiction, and engage with gender, performance, and labor across contested sites of development in contemporary Chinese contexts. Notes of a Crocodile (2024) won the Short Film Award at Cinéma du Réel in 2025.
Xu began making films in 2018 as a Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University, where she is an affiliate of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Her films have premiered at festivals and institutions including Toronto International Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Visions du Réel, and Cinéma du Réel.
At MacDowell, she is working on developing a feature length experimental hybrid film building on Notes of a Crocodile. It will be a road movie along the Belt and Road funded Funan Techo Canal in Cambodia.
