Ash Mayfair
Ash Mayfair is a Vietnamese-born filmmaker whose debut feature The Third Wife (2018) attracted wide international attention. Educated in the United Kingdom and the United States, she trained in theatre direction at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and earned an MFA in filmmaking from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her short films, including The Silver Man and No Exit, played widely on the festival circuit. The Third Wife — set in 19th-century rural northern Vietnam and following a fourteen-year-old who becomes the third wife of a wealthy landowner — was inspired by her own family history, including a great-grandmother married into polygamy as a child. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the NETPAC Award, and went on to receive the Gold Hugo for New Directors at the Chicago International Film Festival.