By Lia Chang

AsAmNews Arts and Entertainment Reporter

Hide and Seek, a short film that I star in and co-produced with Garth Kravits, will be shown during a special screening of films from the Asian American Film Lab‘s 2015 72 Hour Shootout Filmmaking competition, on Wednesday, October. 7, 2015 at the Time Warner Theater in New York.

The films at Mass Media Constructions of Beauty have themes that focus on mainstream constructions of beauty and their consequences. The Time Warner Theater is located at One Time Warner Center, 10th fl. Screening Room (58th St. between 8th & 9th Ave. Columbus Circle) in New York. The event is from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM. Click here to RSVP.

I will also be on a panel moderated by Jennifer Betit Yen, actor and president of the Asian American Film Lab, that features Rick Guidotti, award winning fashion photographer and advocate for those with genetic differences; Becky Curran, SAG-AFTRA Coordinator for Equal Employment and Diversity; and Blue Michael, model and founder of Blue Michael Cosmetics. We’ll address the societal implications of mainstream beauty images. A networking reception follows the discussion.

Guidotti, an award-winning former fashion photographer, has spent the past fifteen 15 years working internationally with advocacy organizations/NGOs, medical schools, universities and other educational institutions to effect a sea-change in societal attitudes towards individuals living with genetic difference; his work has been published in newspapers, magazines and journals as diverse as Elle, the American Journal of Medical Genetics and the Washington Post. He founded Positive Exposure, an innovative arts, education and advocacy organization, working with individuals living with genetic, physical, cognitive and behavioral differences. His photographic exhibition, Positive Exposure; The Spirit of Difference, premiered at the People’s Genome Celebration, June 2001, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and continues to exhibit in galleries, museums and public arenas internationally.

Michael was born and raised in New York. As a performer in the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, he picked up the natural talent of makeup artistry. After many years of working with other brands he decided to start Blue Michael Cosmetics, a brand that mirrors his true belief in #BYourBeautiful “Let us celebrate You.”.

Betit Yen is an award winning actress, writer, producer, and a “recovering” attorney. She is the president of the Asian American Film Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to the promotion and support of gender and ethnic diversity in media, the CEO of MyJennyBook, a company providing multimedia stories for children, and is currently in production on a film entitled The Opposite of a Fairy Tale, designed to draw light to the issue of elder abuse, funded by a grant from the Ms. Foundation. As an actor, Betit Yen has appeared in productions at East West Players and Lodestone in Los Angeles and at the Manhattan Theatre Source and Snapple Theatre in New York. Her television credits include Royal Pains, Dirt, Film Lab Presents, The Beacon Street Girls, Reading Rainbow, and America’s Most Wanted, among others.

Becky Curran joined SAG-AFTRA in April 2014, and has assisted with several diversity and inclusion efforts within the entertainment and news media industries. Curran graduated with a bachelor’s of science in marketing degree from Providence College in 2006, and then moved to Los Angeles, where she worked for one of Hollywood’s top talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency (CAA). After CAA, she worked at CBS Television Studios in casting. Curran also served as the marketing director and co-founding board member of the Catalina Film Festival.

Mass Media Constructions of Beauty is presented by Film Lab, Time Warner and the APEX group.

Lia Chang is an award-winning filmmaker, a Best Actress nominee, a photographer, and the Arts and Entertainment reporter for AsAmNews.com. Chang recently received a Best Actress nomination at the 2015 Asian American Film Lab 72 Hour Shootout. Lia has appeared in the films Wolf, New Jack City, A Kiss Before Dying, King of New York, Big Trouble in Little China, The Last Dragon, Taxman and Hide and Seek. She is a Scripps Howard New Media Fellow at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, a Visual Journalism Fellow at the Poynter Institute for New Media and a Western Knight Fellow at USC’s Annenberg College of Communications for Specialized Journalism on Entertainment Journalism in the Digital Age. She is the recipient of the AAJA 2001 National Award for New Media and the OCA 2000 Chinese American Journalist Award. Avenue Magazine named her one of the “One Hundred Most Influential Asian Americans”. She is featured in Joann Faung Jean Lee’s book Asian American actors: oral histories from stage, screen, and television. She is profiled in Jade Magazine and FebOne1960.com Blog.