Yiyang Xu grew up in Jiangyin, a small city on the banks of the Yangtze River. She holds a BA from Smith College. Her work spans China, the United States, and Europe, centering on migration and diaspora, generational trauma, womanhood, and queer experience — with a particular attentiveness to emotional lives lived at the margins. Water, ever-present in her upbringing, recurs throughout her work as a visual metaphor for fluid emotion and shifting perspective. In 2024, she wrote and directed her debut short Bể Cá (Fishbowl) at FAMU in Prague, drawing on the local Vietnamese immigrant community as its creative foundation; the film screened both within the school and at a public cinema in the city. In 2025, she created Castaway, a short film rooted in her experience accompanying her grandfather through his final days, currently in post-production. Across her films, she works in the space between documentary and fiction, using an intimate visual language to give form to stories that are difficult to tell.