Mona Xia

Mona is a Chinese-American documentary filmmaker who briefly moonlighted as a studio executive. She grew up between Beijing and Los Angeles and received a BA in Cinema Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Initially, she worked in scripted development and moved into production on Netflix studio films like The Irishman. Mona then discovered her passion for nonfiction stories and transitioned to the documentary series team as a creative assistant. Shadowing on documentaries like My Octopus Teacher and jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, she eventually became a creative manager, where she oversaw a slate of fifteen shows, including Keep Sweet, Gunther’s Millions, and Our Universe.

Mona was fueled by a desire to bridge the gap between commercial documentaries and diverse, under-represented stories, so she left Netflix in 2022 to pursue her own projects. Since then, Mona has freelance produced for docuseries like Surf Girls Hawai’i (Amazon Sports) and Sprint (Netflix). Additionally, Mona directed and produced the short documentary Kowloon!, about the biggest Chinese restaurant in the US. The film won accolades such as Special Mention for Best Documentary Short at the Palm Springs ShortsFest, the Jonathan Laxamana Emerging Filmmakers Award, and screened at festivals like AFI Fest, Big Sky and more. 

Mona’s upcoming animation-documentary short film is funded by Pacific Islanders in Communications and features a volcanologist exploring her relationship to Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Across a varied body of work, Mona continues to explore her fascination with intergenerational relationships and ancestral memory.