Arthur Dong produces award-winning films and videos that combine the art of the visual medium with an investigation of social issues. His passion for filmmaking actually began in high school where he created his first film, “Public,” a five-minute animated piece that explored a child’s visceral responses to violence.

DeepFocus Productions, Inc. recently released Arthur’s first DVD collection, “Stories from the War on Homosexuality,” which includes: “Family Fundamentals,” a study on America’s cultural wars over homosexuality as experienced in three fundamentalist families with gay adult children, Licensed to Kill, a brutal look into the minds of murderers who killed gay men, and Coming Out Under Fire, a historical investigation of gay and lesbian soldiers during World War II when the military established its first explicit anti-gay policies.

Among Arthur’s productions about Asians are: Sewing Woman, a documentary about his mother’s immigration from China to America, Forbidden City, U.S.A., a musical tribute to the plight of Asian American nightclub performers in the 1940s, and Lotus, a half-hour drama which indicts the foot-binding of Chinese women. Currently in development is The Chinese in Hollywood Project (working title), a visual and social history of the Chinese in American feature films, from the early 1900s up to present day.

At the Los Angeles PBS station, KCET-TV, Arthur produced twelve documentaries for the Emmy award-winning series, Life & Times. For national PBS, Arthur covered the birth of radical gay liberation starting with the New York City Stonewall Riots in Out Rage ’69, the premiere episode of The Question of Equality, the first public television series to cover the modern gay and lesbian civil rights movement.

Winner of a George Foster Peabody Award, three Sundance Film Festival awards, an Oscar^® nomination, and five Emmy nominations, Arthur has received funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the American Film institute, the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund, the Hugh Hefner Foundation, among many others. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hawai’i International Film Festival, and Outfest in Los Angeles. Arthur has been named a Guggenheim Fellow in Film and a Rockefeller Fellow in Media.

For his public service, Arthur has been recognized with a number of community honors, including: the James Wong Howe Award from the Association of Asian Pacific Artists, the Steve Tatsukawa Award from Visual Communications, the Asian American Media Award from Asian CineVision, the Historian Award from the Chinese Historical Society of America, two consecutive GLAAD Media Awards (and a third nomination), the Paul Monette Award, and the OUT 100 Award from OUT Magazine.

Arthur is a graduate of the Film School at San Francisco State University (1982, Summa Cum Laude) and the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies (Directing Fellow, 1984). He is on the Board of Governors at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, representing the Documentary Branch. He is also a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and served on the IFP/Los Angeles Board of Directors (2000-2003).

Arthur’s Los Angeles-based company, DeepFocus Productions, Inc., was established in 1982.