Lee Mun Wah is an internationally renowned Chinese American documentary filmmaker, author, poet, Asian folk teller, educator, community therapist, and master diversity trainer. For more than 25 years he was a resource specialist and counselor in the San Francisco Unified School District. He later became a consultant to private schools, working with students that had severe learning and behavioral issues.
Lee Mun Wah is now the Executive Director of StirFry Seminars & Consulting, a diversity training company that provides educational tools and workshops on issues pertaining to cross-cultural communication and awareness, mindful facilitation, and conflict mediation techniques. Thousands of people from government and social service agencies, corporations and educational institutions have taken Lee Mun Wah’s workshops and partnered with StirFry Seminars & Consulting on their diversity initiatives.
His first film, Stolen Ground, about the experience of Asian Americans, won honorable mention at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and his most famous film about racism, The Color of Fear, won the Gold Medal for Best Social Studies Documentary. Part Two of this film, Walking Each Other Home, won the Cindy Competition Silver Medal for Social Science. In 1995, Oprah Winfrey produced a one-hour special on Lee Mun Wah’s life and work.
[Click here to see clips from Lee Mun Wah’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show]
In 2005, Lee Mun Wah directed and produced the film, Last Chance for Eden, a three-part documentary on sexism and racism. His newest book, Let’s Get Real –What People of Color Can’t Say & Whites Won’t Ask About Racism, along with the film, If These Halls Could Talk: Teachers Edition, dealing with college students and their perspectives on diversity issues such as race and racism in higher education, were both released in 2011.
It is Lee Mun Wah’s belief that we cannot wait until tomorrow for some charismatic leader to appear who will bring us all together. We each must take a stand and personally participate in this important journey of confronting our fears and beginning a conversation not only with those we love but also with those we have been taught to fear. We cannot continue being separate and unequal without there being a cost to each and every generation. Our survival and the very future of our children depend on all of us embracing our differences as well as our mutuality. If we can accomplish this in our lifetime, we can then look back and know that we have found a way to live together authentically and harmoniously, using and honoring all of our gifts and special contributions. To Lee Mun Wah, that is the true meaning of multiculturalism.