Born in inner China and raised in the coastal city Shenzhen, Kathy Ou is a bilingual multimedia reporter, film critic and documentary filmmaker based in New York City. She moved to Los Angeles, California in 2018 at seventeen, where she lived for five years and where the bougainvillea blossoms reminded her of home. She found the biggest difference between Southern California and southern China was that the latter’s was much more humid.
Kathy’s journalism journey began with photographing for her college newspaper, The Occidental, whereby she developed an ear and interest for interviewing and shifted to writing. She is driven by stories about community resilience and people seeking new ways to build, sustain and reinvent their communities for the better. Throughout her four years at the paper, Kathy covered the Northeast Los Angeles neighborhoods in photos, videos and articles, from small businesses and special education to local arts and politics. As a fellow of the 2023 Asian American Journalists Association VOICES program, she photographed and wrote about the competing visions for Los Angeles’ Chinatown from various community stakeholders and members.
As a film critic, Kathy has written for a range of blogs and magazines such as The Amp, Offscreen, Frame Rated, Aotu Doc (凹凸镜) etc. Her experiences as a production assistant and behind-the-scenes photographer in numerous film sets as well as archival producing for a feature-length documentary have given her writings a somewhat compassionate edge. She welcomes movie dates and book chats, but particularly talks about docu-fiction, Albert Camus and the art of sitting still.
Kathy currently studies at New York University’s graduate program of Cultural Reporting and Criticism. She pitches and takes commissions.