ANTONIA KAO
Director/ Producer
is a San Francisco Bay Area based artist currently working primarily in painting and photography.

As a documentary filmmaker, her work has won awards and screened at film festivals internationally, including Women in the Director's Chair, The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and Outfest.

Her directorial credits include Lullaby (1999), an alternative creation myth which won an Outfest Audience Award for Best Experimental Short; Straight White Men and Me (2000), an incisive and humorous autobiographical film which won an Anti-Defamation League Dore Schary Documentary Finalist Award; and Pup (2005), a tenderhearted documentary about a little-known fetish which won the CineKink Best Documentary Short Award.

Her film path included co-founding Doculink.org, a grassroots support network for nonfiction filmmakers, which she co-led from 2002 to 2005. With USC Graduate School of Cinema-TV colleague Robert Bahar , she grew the organization from a handful of filmmakers in a living room to a vibrant community of over 2000 members worldwide.

During this same period, Antonia field/associate produced and shot for various independent and television documentaries, including Bad Boys of Summer , about the San Quentin prison baseball team; Howard Thurman: In Search of Common Ground , about the man cited by Life Magazine in 1953 as one of America's greatest preachers; Raising Teens , about teens with gay parents; and Gender Rebel , about those who identify as neither male nor female. Projects she has worked on have broadcast on PBS, Discovery Health, MTV, LOGO, and TLC. A version of the Howard Thurman film is on permanent exhibit at MoAD, The Museum of the African Diaspora.

As a print journalist previous to working in film, Antonia freelanced for and was published in various publications, including The New York Times, Girlfriends Magazine, and Sojourner: The Women's Forum.

Antonia holds an MFA from the University of Southern California Graduate School of Cinema-TV and a BA from Wellesley College.