Tony Bui

Vietnamese Diaspora, Vietnam War Cinema, Asian Cinema, Asian representation in the arts

Tony Bui is a Sundance award-winning writer, director, and producer. He served as Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and teaches in Columbia’s School of the Arts graduate film program. He is the founding director of Vietnam Arts in Action (VAiA), an initiative at Columbia that advances cross-cultural dialogue through cinema and the arts.

His short film Yellow Lotus was the first Vietnamese-language film to screen at the Sundance Film Festival and received more than 15 national and international festival awards.

His feature debut, Three Seasons, was the first American–Vietnamese co-production filmed entirely in Vietnam. The film made history at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize, Audience Award, and Best Cinematography Award. It received two Independent Spirit Award nominations and was selected as Vietnam’s official submission to the Academy Awards, where it was shortlisted. In 2024, Three Seasons returned to Sundance as one of ten films chosen from the festival’s four-decade history to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

Tony is a recipient of the Humanitas Prize and an alumnus of the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriting and Directing Labs. He has written and developed projects for HBO, Warner Bros., and NBC.

Through his work at Columbia, he has convened filmmakers, artists, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists, and global thinkers for public dialogues on the role of artists and truth-seekers in shaping cultural memory and public understanding.

In 2024, he organized a series of international conversations across Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Beijing titled Conversations in Storytelling: Regional Voices, Global Impact, bringing together leading filmmakers to explore the importance of regional storytelling in a globalized world.

In 2025, Tony curated Legacies of War: Vietnam Across the Divides for the Criterion Channel, a program of American and Vietnamese war films marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The series marked the first time a showcase of Vietnamese cinema became available for streaming to a national audience.

He previously served on the Board of Directors of Film Independent and currently serves on the Global Advisory Board of Fulbright University Vietnam.

His next narrative feature film is inspired by the iconic Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph known as the “Napalm Girl,” exploring the intertwined histories behind one of the most powerful images of the Vietnam War.