Betty Yu (she/her) is an award-winning socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker and activist born and raised in New York City to Chinese immigrant parents. Betty’s art emerges from collective struggle, and she places it in the service of building collective power. As a cultural worker, she remains deeply connected to grassroots organizing and has over twenty five years of community, media justice, and labor organizing experience. Yu integrates documentary film, installation, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice. She is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Betty’s work has focused on workers’ rights, immigration, gentrification, police violence, class, race, media justice, and other issues. Ms. Yu's documentary "Resilience" about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions screened at national and international film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Yu's multi-media installation, "The Garment Worker" was featured at Tribeca Film Institute's Interactive Showcase. In 2020, she worked with housing activists to create "Resistance in Progress" , a multimedia installation featured at Queens Museum. Betty recently had her first solo exhibition, "(Dis)Placed in Sunset Park" at Open Source Gallery in September 2018 in New York City. This work was also included in 2019 BRIC’s Biennial where her project received an honorable mention in the New York Times.  Ms. Yu has received numerous grants for our work including support from Art Matters Foundation, Asian Womens Giving Circle, A Blade of Grass, Brooklyn Arts Council, Wave Farm Media Arts and the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media. 

Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, NY Historical Society, Tenement Museum, Artists Space/ISP Whitney Museum, Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Tribeca Film Festival's Interactive Showcase, 2019 BRIC Biennial, Apexart,Pace University Art Gallery, Transmitter Gallery, 601 Artspace, Five Myles, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center. In 2017 Ms. Yu won the Aronson Journalism for Social Justice Award for her film "Three Tours" about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq, and their journey to overcome PTSD.  In 2018, she had a solo exhibition at Open Source Gallery in New York. Betty had her curatorial debut in the Fall 2020 as she presented “Imagining De-Gentrified Futures”, an exhibition that will feature artists of color, activists and others along with her own work at Apex Art in Tribeca, NYC. Her work has received coverage in outlets including New York Times, HBO VICE News Tonight, NBC, i-D Vice Media, Art Forum, ARTNews, Sinovision, Hyperallergic, E-Flux, La Belle Revue Art Journal & Studio International.

She holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College/CUNY, and an New Media Narratives certificate from the International Center of Photography. She teaches video, social practice, art and activism at Pratt Institute, Hunter College and The New School. In addition Betty Yu sits on the boards of Third World Newsreel and Working Films, two progressive documentary film organizations. She also sits on the advisory board of More Art, an arts organization promoting public art in the community.