Born in 1972 in Jilin, northeastern China, Yang Lina (aka Tianyi Yang 杨天乙) is a leading figure in Chinese independent documentary. She graduated from the Art Academy of the People’s Liberation Army in 1995 and danced and acted in numerous ballets, theater plays and feature films, including Jia Zhangke’s _Platform_. She started to work as an independent documentary filmmaker in 1997 and was among the first to have adopted digital video to document the rapidly changing urban landscape and social fabric of Beijing around the turn of the 21st century. Her first documentary, _Old Men_, won a New Asian Currents Excellence Award at the 1999 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, and the 2000 SCAM prize at the Cinéma du Réel international documentary film festival in Paris. In 2013, Yang turned her talents to fiction filmmaking with _Longing for the Rain_, a challenging exploration of female sexuality in modern Chinese society. The film was nominated for prizes at the 2013 International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Taipei Golden Horse Awards, and won a Special Mention at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Her second narrative film, _Spring Tide_, examines three generations of women who also represent different eras of Chinese history, and was the winner of the Audience Award at the 2019 FIRST International Film Festival in Xining, China.