Festival Jury

Jurors judge the best feature and short films in the festival competition and choose the top film in each category, along with a Grand Jury award winner.

Prashant Bhargava is the director of Patang (The Kite), which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and has gone on to play in over 30 international film festivals. The film was hailed for its “hypnotically beautiful visuals,” “naturalistic storytelling,” and “colorfully vivid” poetic style, and garnered four stars from Roger Ebert and was selected as a New York Times Critics Pick. His short film, Sangam, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and was distributed by Film Movement and broadcast by Arte/ZDF, the Sundance Channel, MUBI, and PBS. Sangam was awarded Best Narrative Short at SDAFF in 2004.

Emily Roxworthy is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she teaches Asian American theatre and film. Dr. Roxworthy is the author of the book The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II. She was also the project director of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded video game prototype called Drama in the Delta, which allows players to reenact life in a Japanese American internment camp.

Jen Wang is the cofounder and author of DISGRASIAN.com, or, in the words of right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin, a professional “Race Hustler.” She’s been featured on Nightline, NPR, The Associated Press, BBC News, The Daily Beast, HuffPost Live, Patt Morrison, Metro NY’s “Best of the Blogs,” Hyphen magazine, and KoreAm Journal, among others. In 2008, she created a web series for Adult Swim. Jen is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and xoJane.

Martin Wong co-founded Giant Robot in 1994 and edited all 68 issues of the seminal, influential, and funny print magazine about Asian and Asian American culture. Today, the UCLA graduate continues to contribute to the Giant Robot website while working for interTrend, a Long Beach-based, Asian-focused advertising and communications company.