LIU Xiaohui

Xiaohui Liu (b. 1998) is a documentary filmmaker, artist, and anthropology researcher currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Working with sound and moving images, she explores human–nature relationships, Indigenous beliefs and cultures, and everyday life under environmental change. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, her practice uses listening and observation to explore experiences of living across species and how these experiences are sensed, narrated, and represented. Her work has received recognition at international academic film festivals and within ethnographic cinema. Her documentary Arbors, Herbs and Banana Leaves was selected for the 2025 Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival and the Sixth Chinese Ethnographic Documentary Academic Biennale. It received an outstanding film distinction in Chinese visual anthropology and a Best Soundscape Award, and is held in the permanent collections of the National Library of China and the National Museum of Ethnology, China. Her documentary Who Has Seen the Sounds? screened at the Association for Asian Studies’ annual Film Exposition and was acquired by Cornell University Library. In recent years, her research and filmmaking have increasingly focused on Tibetan areas of China, exploring Tibetan women’s sonic knowledge, spiritual experiences, and human–bear relationships, while examining the possibilities of ethnographic cinema for engaging with multispecies life and invisible experiences.