RENE BALCER

René Balcer is an Emmy, WGA and Edgar-award-winning Canadian-American television writer, producer, and showrunner, as well as a documentary filmmaker and photographer. He is best known as the Emmy-Award winning showrunner of Law & Order and the creator and showrunner of the award-winning series Law & Order: Criminal Intent and for creating FBI: Most Wanted; He also created the limited series Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders and the Paris-based series Jo with Jean Reno.

As a documentary filmmaker, Balcer has made a number of films on China-related
subjects, including his 2017 award-winning film Above the Drowning Sea about refugees in China. His new documentary, Painting the Chinese Dream on American photographer Joan Lebold Cohen, will be out in early 2027.

Balcer is also a visual artist and photographer and has been the subject of several solo shows in New York and China. His work has been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Aldrich Museum, the Asia Society and other institutions here and abroad, and has been reviewed by such art magazines as HyperAllergic and ImageInk. Desaparecidos, a 44-image photo array, has been installed permanently at the headquarters of the Americas Society in New York City. A monograph of his work, René Balcer: Seeing As, was published in 2023. His writing on social issues has been recognized with awards from Planned Parenthood, the Alliance for Justice, the American Bar Association and other organizations. Balcer has lectured widely about writing, art and the duties of artists in free societies, notably at Harvard, Columbia, NYU, UPenn, the Sorbonne, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), and the Journalists Club (Moscow).
He’s currently in development on a series at Warner Brothers.

CAROLYN HSU-BALCER

Carolyn Hsu-Balcer is a designer, philanthropist and art collector based in Los Angeles and New York.

As a philanthropist, Carolyn has worked to foster Sino-American understanding through education and culture. Her interest in cross-cultural exchanges has led her to organize ground-breaking exhibits of Chinese art including “Xu Bing Tobacco Project Virginia” (2011 VMFA), “Light Before Dawn” (2013 Asia Society Hong Kong), “Blooming in the Shadows” (2011 China Institute NY), “Ming Cho Lee: A Retrospective” (2011 Ningbo Museum), and “Oil and Water: Re-Interpreting Ink” (2014 MOCA NY).

Carolyn has produced award-winning documentaries on Chinese art, including “The No Name Painting Association” and “Xu Bing Tobacco Project Virginia”. In publishing, she has sponsored the publication of a 13-volume catalogue of the works of the Wuming group of Chinese artists, and the publication of “Ai Wei Wei: New York Photographs 1983-1993”.

Carolyn has co-edited and co-published the historical biographies Kuo Ping Wen Scholar, Reformer, Statesman (2016) and C.T. Wang: Looking Back and Looking Forward (2008); the artbook A Token of Elegance (2015), a historical and photo survey of cigarette holders as objets d'art; and Chow! Secrets of Chinese Cooking (2020), an updated edition of a timeless classic about Chinese cuisine and culture and winner of a 2021 Gourmand World Cookbook Award.