Emmy award-winning video journalist
& filmmaker
NEWEST WORK
Historian’s Take (2022): A Docuseries on Pop Culture & History on PBS Origins
Director & Creator of Historian’s Take on PBS Origins
Dolly Li is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker from Brooklyn, NY. She is the director and creator of the pop culture and history show, Historian’s Take, on PBS Origins. Her work focuses on culturally nuanced stories about global communities.
Dolly cut her teeth as a journalist at Al Jazeera. In 2017, she received a Regional Emmy in Northern California for her short documentary, How Chop Suey Saved San Francisco's Chinatown, the first episode of an award-winning series examining Chinese cuisine from the Mississippi Delta to the San Gabriel Valley. She’s since produced viral short documentaries from Texas to Beijing to Seoul.
In 2018, she moved to Hong Kong and launched Goldthread, a video publication focused on food, culture, and travel stories, incubated by the South China Morning Post.
In 2019, Dolly founded her production company, Plum Studios, which is producing nonfiction stories for digital and premium platforms. She studied Visual Arts at Rice University and is based in Los Angeles.
Telly Award-Winning Series: A People’s History of Asian America on PBS Voices
“This whole series kicks ass.” —Junot Diaz
“Chinese Food: An All-American Cuisine” is an award-winning documentary series published on Al Jazeera’s digital channel, AJ+. I pitched, produced, and hosted this series that explores three different Chinese communities in urban, suburban, and rural America.
