Michael Berry

Michael Berry (; born May 1, 1974) is an American sinologist and translator specializing in Chinese literature and film. He is a professor of contemporary Chinese Cultural studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is the director of the Center for Chinese Studies.

Early life and education

Berry was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Freehold, New Jersey. When he was nineteen years old, Berry studied Mandarin Chinese at Nanjing University. He graduated from Rutgers University with a Bachelor of Arts and, as undergraduate, studied Chinese in Taiwan at National Taiwan Normal University. He then earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature and film studies at Columbia University in 2004.

Career

Berry joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2003, where he taught for over a decade and served as Director of the East Asia Center. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2006 and to full Professor in 2011.

In 2016, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media and serves as Director of the Center for Chinese Studies.

Berry’s research focuses on Chinese literature, cinema, trauma studies, and translation studies. He has authored and edited several scholarly works and has translated contemporary Chinese authors into English. He has also published numerous book-length oral history projects in both English and Chinese, which have chronicled the work of major Chinese culture figures such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Ann Hui, and Cui Zi'en. His literary translations of contemporary Chinese writers, such as Yu Hua, Wang Anyi, and Fang Fang have won numerous awards and also generated controversy.

Awards and recognition

Berry has received a number of honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, the Baifang Schell Book Prize in 2025, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for literary translation.

Public controversies

In 2018, Berry served on the jury of the Golden Horse Awards, where remarks by Taiwanese filmmaker Fu Yue sparked political controversy involving Cross-Strait relations.

In 2020, his English translation of Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary became the subject of international debate and criticism amid discussions about censorship and the global reception of Chinese narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Selected works

Research monographs

Republished Rye Field, 2016 Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (British Film Institute / Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; Guangxi Normal, 2011)

Oral history projects

Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (Duke University Press, 2022; Showwe, 2021; Guangxi Normal, 2021) Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (INK,2014; Guangxi Normal, 2015) Voiceover: Conversations with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Showwe, 2023) Enter the Clowns: Cui Zi’en’s Chinese Queer Cinema (Showwe, 2022) Between the Lines: Conversations with Contemporary Sinophone Writers (Two volumes, Showwe, 2025)

Edited volumes

The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Taiwan Uprising (Columbia University Press, 2022; Rye Field, 2020)

Remains of Life by Wu He (Columbia University Press, 2017)

The Running Flame by Fang Fang (Columbia University Press, 2025)

The Privileged: A Novel by Wu Xiaole (Amazon Crossing, 2025) Dead Souls by Han Song (Amazon Crossing, 2025)