Diane Tsai is a Taiwanese-American documentary filmmaker and journalist at TIME.
She directed and produced the TIME Studios feature documentary Be Our Guest (DOC NYC 2021), which follows a New Hampshire family with four school-aged children as they open their home to strangers in recovery from opioid addiction.
Her latest credits include directing Beyond Butterfly, which won a 2023 Gracie Award; and editing Too Hot to Work: Qatar’s World Cup Building Boom, which received Best Documentary at the Paris Independent Film Festival and POYi’s Documentary Journalism Award of Excellence. She also edited Renter Revolt: Housing and Human Rights in America’s Heartland for TIME in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Pulitzer Center. In 2022, she produced the documentary short A Gender Migration Begins: Families of Trans Children Leave Restrictive States.
Previously, Tsai produced and filmed the award-winning TIME documentary series Firsts, which features more than 50 groundbreaking women, including Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Serena Williams, and many others. Recognition for the project includes POYi Documentary Project of the Year, a Webby Award nomination, Society of Publication Designers Gold Medal, and the U.S. State Department’s American Film Showcase. In 2018, she was part of a team named Livingston Award finalists for The Silence Breakers, a short documentary about the individuals whose voices sparked the #MeToo movement and were named TIME’s Person of the Year. The film also received a Webby Award and was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick.
Since 2018, Tsai has traveled internationally to lecture and lead filmmaking workshops for the U.S. State Department and USC School of Cinematic Arts through their film diplomacy program, the American Film Showcase. She is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and is currently based in Los Angeles.
