Women's History Month Profile: Loni Ding

Loni Ding, who died at age 78, on February 20, 2010, was an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker and activist who produced such groundbreaking PBS documentary series as Ancestors in the Americas, The Color of Honor and Nisei Soldier: Standard Bearer for an Exiled People. Through her work, she for the first time brought the history and experiences of Asians in the U.S. to the attention of the nation at large.

Loni Ding Isadora Quanehia Ding Welsh was the last of seven children born to parents who emigrated from China to San Francisco in 1919. After spending several years in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where the family ran an herb shop, her parents moved to an apartment above an Irish bar in a working class San Francisco neighborhood when Loni was three.

As she explained to writer Barbara Abrash in the 1992 book Artist and Influence, “All through my school years right up until the time I went to college at U.C. Berkeley, I attended schools in which my sisters and brothers were the only Asians.” Loni earned her undergraduate degree as well as her M.A. and Ph.D. at Berkeley. But then, she told Abrash, “the Vietnam War came along while I was doing my dissertation.” Being at Berkeley during the Vietnam era put Loni on a meandering trajectory that led to her ultimate career producing documentaries for PBS television and other outlets.

“We were among the leaders of the anti-war movement,” she said. “I ended up finally leaving the university for full-time organizing against the war.” She eventually became involved in media advocacy, trying to ensure a voice for the various communities of color. She gained her first production experience working on a 65-episode TV program to teach basic English to Chinese immigrants.

Loni next became a trainee at KQED public television in San Francisco, a member of “a training program for people of color. So there I was again, still a person of color, ‘officially’ a person of color along with nine other ‘official’ persons of color!”

She said, “Some of us started working together to formulate positions, to lobby Congress, to gather together the support of all the other independent filmmakers in this country to recognize that they weren't just doing their own work, they were doing really significant work.”

Remembering Loni on the Center for Asian American Media website, longtime friend Stephen Gong wrote, “Her calling, it turned out was to be a storyteller and educator…And the stories she told in The Color Of Honor and Ancestors in the Americas…have changed the way millions of Americans have understood our common history. She taught history and she made history.”

Loni was a long-time professor of sociology, Asian American history, media analysis and media production at the University of California at Berkeley. She was also a guest lecturer at Cornell, Syracuse University, the New School for Social Research and other educational institutions. The photo above shows Loni in 2006, flanked by two of her former Berkeley students, Peggy Lee (at left) and Jennifer Yin.

In her action-packed life, Loni also found time to found the nonprofit Center for Educational Telecommunications, which produces and consults on multicultural programming. She helped establish the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (now Center for Asian American Media), the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and San Francisco PBS station KQED's Open Studio. She was also co-president of the national board of the New York-based Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.

To learn more about Loni Ding:

Click here to visit Cetel, the organization she founded.

Visit the PBS site about Ancestors in the Americas.

Read a 2001 interview done for the Asia Society.

Click here to read the tribute to Loni by the Asian American Journalists Association.

March 29, 2010

— by Michele Hush