by Hoc Poeng on November 8th, 2007

Jade Wu is a cross-industry hyphenate spanning the business, literary, acting, filmmaking and non-profit arenas. A previous incarnations includes a twenty year stint as an advertising and marketing executive, leading a 22-person staff in her own company servicing clients such as HBO International, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank of New York, The American Health Foundation and Merck.

As a professional actor, Jade won a Best Actress Nomination at the Edinburgh Fetival for her role as Medea. She has worked with veteran award-winning stage directors, Joanne Akalaitis, George C. Wolfe, Alan Schneider, Gerald Gutierrez, Blanka Zizka, Lisa Wolpe and famed film directors, Spike Lee, Tony Scott, Bronwyn Hughes, Michael Kang and Miguel Arteta. On stage, Jade was last seen in Central Park’s celebrity and award-winning cast and crew production of award-winning playwright Tony Kusher’s Mother Courage with Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Austin Pendleton directed by George C. Wolfe. Her most recent film credit was in the lead role as Ahma Chin in the Sundance pedigree film, THE MOTEL which won the Humanitas Prize and an Independent Spirit Award nomination.

Prior, Jade’s work in Urban Stages’ acclaimed production of COMFORT WOMEN brought to fore the historical atrocities of sex slavery during World War II. Concurrent with that production, she had begun to collaborate with the award-winning author, Iris Chang (THE RAPE OF NANKING), on a stage play about the evolution of the Chinese in America. Tragically, Iris Chang committed suicide before the project had a chance to move forward, however, Jade narrated the audio book of Iris’ last 492-page novel, THE CHINESE IN AMERICA: A NARRATIVE HISTORY produced by Recorded Books. Jade also garnered attention for the tortures of a Peking Opera singer during China’s Cultural Revolution in Chay Yew’s award-winning stage play, RED, at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre and received critical acclaim in the prized lead role of Mother God Damn in the New York revival of the 1920’s scandalous Broadway hit, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE.

In television, Jade has acted in recurring acting roles on LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT, ONE LIFE TO LIVE, THE JURY, and HOMICIDE working with acclaimed producer/directors Barry Levinson, Ule Edel, Clark Johnson, Tom Fontana, and Frank Prinzi.

To provide a viable conduit for necessary socio-cultural literary, film, stage and new media works, in 2002, Jade founded a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization, Golden Phoenix Productions, which nurtures and supports work with themes dealing with human rights, cultural and social awareness.

As a filmmaker, Jade wrote, directed, produced and is currently in post-production for two feature documentaries, IN SEARCH OF GOLDEN PHOENIX: THE INVISIBLE LEGACY about an illiterate Chinese-Burmese octogenarian who maintained sanity from 50 years of domestic abuse by creating her own hieroglyphic language in daily journals and JESUS OF BURMA, a personal experience of being detained by Myanmar’s Junta government for several weeks. Her work has been official selections in the IFP Market, Sundance Producers Conference Workshop, the Asian American International Film Festival and the Anthology Film Archives Emerging Filmmaker Series. Her films have received financial support from the Jerome Foundation, New York Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and Film/Video Arts. She has earned Filmmaking Fellowships from Film/Video Arts and IFP.

Jade has also served four years as an International Emmy Awards Juror for the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and three years as a Jury Panelist for NYSCA’s Individual Artist Grants and has been a guest panelist at the Asian American International Film Festival and the PBS syndicated television show, ASIAN AMERICA.

In the literary world, Jade was recently awarded the Disney/ABC Writing Fellowship and is a semi-finalist for the acclaimed PEN USA’s literary Emerging Voices Writing Fellowship.

She is currently writing a novel, JESUS OF BURMA, the companion non-fiction book to her film, and just finished penning a feature film script and television pilot in addition to developing a cross platform media project that integrates traditional broadcast and new media with simultaneous international audience interaction.