Anocha Suwichakornpong
Anocha Suwichakornpong is a Thai independent film director, screenwriter and producer. She is currently Professor of Film at Columbia University, where she advises thesis students in the MFA Film Program and teaches film directing. She was formerly Visiting Lecturer on Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
She has directed four feature films and over a dozen shorts films. Her films include Come Here ; By the Time It Gets Dark ; and Mundane History.
Her films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto; Cinema Moderne, Montreal; and Olhar De Cinema, Brazil, among others. Her work, informed by the socio-political history of Thailand, has received international critical acclaim and numerous awards.
She is the recipient of the 2019 Prince Claus award for:
In 2020, she was a recipient of the Silpathorn Award, an honour for living Thai contemporary artists presented annually by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture of Thailand. In 2024, she was selected for the Creative Capital Award.
As is common in Thai culture, her friends, colleagues and fans often refer to her by her nickname, Mai.
She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY and Bangkok.
Early life
Anocha Suwichakornpong was born in Thailand 1976 to second generation Chinese immigrants. She spent her early childhood in Pattaya before moving to England at the age of fourteen. After completing undergraduate studies in London, she received an M.A. from University of Warwick in Arts Education and Cultural Studies. In 2006, she graduated from the MFA film program at Columbia University, where she was a recipient of Hollywood Foreign Press Association Fellowship.Career
Anocha's thesis film from Columbia University, Graceland, premiered at 59th Cannes Film Festival. It the first Thai short to be selected at Cannes Film Festival. It was also featured at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and many other festivals. During the production of Graceland, Anocha began working with her long-term collaborators, cinematographer Leung Ming Kai and editor Lee Chatametikool. The same year, she was selected to participate in the Talent Campus at Berlin Film Festival, where her feature-length script was among the 15 projects chosen to take part in the Script Clinic.She co-founded her production company, Electric Eel Films, in Bangkok in 2006. In 2017, she co-founded Purin Pictures, a film fund that supports independent cinema in Southeast Asia, offering much needed assistance in a region that lacks adequate governmental support.
She is the first filmmaker in Columbia University's MFA Film Program to receive tenure-track since Miloš Forman in 1978.