photo by Colin Aherne

Yumeng He is a filmmaker and artist working with moving image, sound, and spatial research. Her practice centers on memory, absence, and the ways personal and collective histories settle into bodies, landscapes, and everyday rituals.

Moving between documentary and fiction, she is drawn to spaces of suspension and transition: open fields, domestic interiors, ruins, and sites shaped by political and emotional residue. Her work often centers on what remains unfinished: grief without closure, histories without monuments, and forms of belief that persist quietly in daily life. 

Born in China, lived in California, and currently based in Berlin, her practice is informed by experiences of migration, intergenerational memory, and life in the absence of shared spiritual language. She approaches filmmaking as an ethical gesture, one that privileges duration, restraint, and care over explanation.

She holds an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University, MA and BA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California. She completed her Meisterschüler (post-Master’s degree) under Professor Nina Fischer (Art and Media) at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).

Her films have screened internationally at festivals including IDFA, Oberhausen, Full Frame, Slamdance, ZagrebDox, and Vienna Shorts, and have received a Special Mention at ZagrebDox, an Honorable Mention at Full Frame, and the Best Architecture Film award at Internationale Kurzfilmwoche Regensburg.

She makes work for viewers who are willing to stay.