Born in Taiwan and based in San Francisco & Taipei, Leo received his MFA in film production from
University of Southern California. He lectured in the Social Documentation program at
University of California, Santa Cruz, and was a fellow in the
Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. His previous film,
Our Time Machine, directed with Yang Sun, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, then played at over 50 film festivals worldwide, winning 10 awards, and was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award and a Gotham Award. In 2020, he directed two episodes of the Peabody Award-winning 5-part PBS series,
Asian Americans, which traces the epic history of Asians in the US over the past 200 years. His other films
Out Run, co-directed with award-winning filmmaker
Johnny Symons, premiered at the
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and won Best Cinematography for a Feature Length Documentary Film at the
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival;
Mr. Cao Goes to Washington, won the Inspiration Award at the 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival;
A Village Called Versailles, about the rebuilding and transformation of the Vietnamese American community in post-Katrina New Orleans, was nominated for a national
News & Documentary Emmy Award. It picked up eight film festival awards, aired on PBS
Independent Lens series, and has been acquired by more than 200 academic and public libraries. His other films include
To You Sweetheart, Aloha (PBS broadcast 2006),
One + One (CINE Golden Eagle Award 2002), and
Safe Journey. Leo also collaborates with other documentary filmmakers as an editor (
True-Hearted Vixen, POV 2001;
Recalling Orange County, PBS/VOCES 2006) and as a cameraman (
Ask Not, Independent Lens 2009). His 2023 film
Island in Between, about
Kinmen Island and its Cold War past (e.g.
First Taiwan Strait Crisis and
Second Taiwan Strait Crisis), was nominated for the
96th Academy Awards in the category of
Best Documentary Short Subject. Reuters reported that Chiang "aimed to use the island as a visual representation of the tensions with China, but also to ultimately tell a story about what it means to be Taiwanese." == Filmography ==