Bio

Jinghua is something else.

Whether on the page, stage, screen, or airwaves, Jinghua interrogates the power of unbelonging: as a shapeshifter in a binary-gendered world, as an immigrant in a settler-colonial state, as the long answer to a short question.

Eir work has appeared on ABC TV and in The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Overland, Meanjin, Peril, The Monthly, Cordite, Autostraddle, Them, HuffPost, The Saturday Paper, and Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

In 2016, Jinghua moved to Shanghai to join the English-language media outlet Sixth Tone before it launched. As a reporter and later Head of News, Jinghua shaped every aspect of the publication’s influential coverage of contemporary China, in particular its reputation for rigorous and sensitive reporting on gender issues and LGBTIQ rights. Eir work was recognised by the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Awards with an Honourable Mention in 2017 as a writer and in 2018 as an editor.

Since returning to Australia in 2018, Jinghua has established a multidisciplinary freelance career as a writer, critic, and cross-platform storyteller, with a focus on arts, history, queerness, and China.

Jinghua has produced audio stories and podcasts including Underfoot, four multimedia tours uncovering Footscray’s underground history, and We Weren’t Born Yesterday, a multilingual series exploring Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian and Arab LGBTIQ communities in Australia. Ey was also a broadcaster with 3CR Community Radio’s Queering the Air from 2012 to 2015.

Writing is always part of a conversation and a community: Jinghua founded people of colour performance night POC THE MIC (2010-2012), and co-founded Myriad, a collective supporting trans and gender-diverse talent since 2015. Ey was vice-chair of Peril, a magazine for Asian-Australian writing, arts and culture from 2015 to 2021, and a member of the arts ambassador committee for Maribyrnong City Council from 2019 to 2022. Currently, Jinghua is a union delegate in the MEAA, volunteering to advance freelancers’ rights, and an active part of the rank-and-file group MEAA Members for Palestine.