For more than 20 years, Deanne Borshay Liem has developed, produced and distributed independent films, including her Emmy Award–nominated personal documentary First Person Plural, which won the grand prize for the best Bay Area documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. For her latest project, Geographies of Kinship: The Korean Adoption Story, Ms. Liem received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She visited campus as the 2011 speaker in the Hong Kong Distinguished Lecture Series.
“We’re told, as adoptees, that we were saved from a dire fate. I realized my fate would have been different—I wouldn’t be a filmmaker—but it would not have been dire. The women I met during my trip to Korea had led challenging, difficult lives, but they had led meaningful lives.”