About Eelyn Lee

Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker of Hong Kong-English heritage, whose work has been presented at the Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Palais de Tokyo, as well as at international film festivals.

In recent years, Eelyn's moving image work, Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 was selected for the New Art Exchange Open 2024, where she was awarded the Primary Residency Prize, and her latest moving image work, Anguilla Anguilla, way of the eel will be presented at the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, 2025, and the Karachi Biennial, 2026.

Eelyn's interdisciplinary practice delves into questions of identity and multi-species migration, blending costume, choreography, ritual, and sound to forge new mythologies. Through immersive, time-folding narratives, Eelyn constructs spaces where histories and futures converge - inviting audiences into richly layered worlds that defy linear storytelling and cultural boundaries.

Through a rigorously developed process-led methodology, Eelyn combines collective research, devised theatre, screen writing and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration.

Films
In 2015, Eelyn's award-winning short film Life and Deaf screened at the Berlinale, and in 2017 Creature of the Estuary was selected for the International Fiction Programme at the Bogota Short Film Festival. Monster [2015] features BAFTA / Palme d’Or winner, Anamaria Marinca and Kingsley Ben-Adir [One Love], and was selected for the BAFTA qualifying Aesthetica film festival.

In 2021, Eelyn completed Casting Fu Manchu, a ‘lockdown’ film that sees eleven actors of East and Southeast Asian heritage subvert the racist character, Dr Fu Manchu.

In 2023, Eelyn completed Born on Sunday Silent, a short film funded by BFI Network, and is currently developing her debut narrative feature film. Both films explore hidden stories from Britain's colonial past through genre based story-telling.