Grace Phan

Grace Phan is a former investment banker and award winning television presenter and filmmaker. During her 8 years as a top anchor on CNBC and ABC Asia Pacific, she was named Best News Presenter at the 2000 Asian Television Awards, and nominated Best News Anchor in the 2002 New York Festivals. Harper’s Bazaar magazine recognised her as one of the “10 Most Influential Women of the New Power Generation”.

Grace worked with the former guerrilla leader and current Prime Minister of East Timor, Xanana Gusmao, on her highly acclaimed feature documentary “Where the Sun Rises” (also known as “A Hero’s Journey”). The film won Amnesty International’s Movies that Matter Award, the Special Jury Prize from the American Film Institute International Film Festival, and a Gold Award for cinematography from the Australian Cinematographers Society. It has been released in cinemas, licensed for television internationally, translated into 8 languages and screened in over 20 countries.

Grace is a writer-director and creator of a new type of hybrid movie which bridges the traditional genres of narrative and documentary films, combining groundbreaking nature cinematography with fictional human stories. She will be directing a movie in Japan in 2012.

Prior to her move into media, she worked at JP Morgan and Banque Paribas, specialising in emerging markets bonds and derivatives.

She studied international relations at L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, and the American University in Washington, D.C. Grace is a microlight pilot, scuba diver, art curator and amateur naturalist. She speaks English, French, Mandarin, Indonesian and Japanese.