Yitong Liu

Yitong Liu is a PhD student working at the intersections of cinema, anthropology, ecology, and more-than-human relations. She holds a BA in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Irvine, and an MPhil in Arts, Creativity and Education from the University of Cambridge. Most recently, she completed the Ethnographic and Documentary Film programme at UCL.

Alongside her academic work, Yitong has developed a filmmaking practice spanning more than seven years across fiction and documentary. Several of her independent films have received awards and festival nominations, and she has contributed to a range of collaborative film projects in creative and technical roles, including directing, screenwriting, cinematography, and editing.

Her recent practice has increasingly engaged with questions of environment, embodiment, and the relationship between filmmaking and place. Her graduate film at UCL emerged from sustained ethnographic engagement with a mountain porter community, through which she developed a particular interest in the entanglements between human bodies, landscapes, technologies, and other forms of life.

Research Topic

Within the context of the Anthropocene, Yitong’s doctoral research explores the entanglements of human and nonhuman actants in cinema. Approaching filmmaking as a material and perceptual process, this practice-led project examines the generation of non-anthropocentric film forms through the production of an experimental film on Mount Tai, China. The research adopts a diffractive methodology that treats theory and practice as mutually generative, attending to the interference patterns that emerge within cinematic apparatuses. Through this approach, the study aims to develop a diffractive filmmaking model grounded in the intra-action of humans, animals, environments, the researcher’s body, and technological systems.