Alice Wu

In April 2020, Wu's film The Half of It won the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature (in the U.S. Narrative Competition category) at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.

Wu is the writer, director, and producer of the Netflix film The Half of It. The feature script appeared on The Black List (survey) in 2018. The film is set to be a romantic comedy which follows a Chinese-American teenager as she helps a boy win over his crush, who she also has romantic interest in. The film stars Charmed actress Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, and Alexxis Lemire in the leading roles. It is Wu's first major film since the release of Saving Face in 2005. The film was announced in April 2020 as the winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.

In 2008, she sold a pitch to ABC called "Foobar" based on her experiences working as a woman in the tech world.

In 2006, Saving Face received a nomination at the GLAAD Media Awards.

Saving Face was released in 2005. The film was inspired by her own experiences coming out as a lesbian in the Chinese American community. She has said that she would like the audience to come away from it "with this feeling that, no matter who they are, whether they are gay or straight, or whatever their cultural make-up is, that if there is something that they secretly wanted, whether it's this feeling that they could actually have that great love or whatever it is, that it's never too late to have that. I want them to leave the theater feeling a sense of hope and possibility." Alice struggled with her sexual identity and when she came out as a lesbian she had difference with her mum which lead to a fall out between the two. In an interview with Jan Lisa Huttner, Wu noted that not all of her audience was female, Asian, or lesbian. She found it "highly unusual" that "you can take a group that seems so specific, and make them universally human".

In March 2005, Wu's film Saving Face was the opening film at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Later that year, she received the Visionary award at the San Diego Asian Film Festival to celebrate her directorial debut for Saving Face, and was nominated in the breakthrough director category at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, although she did not win.

Encouraged by her screenwriting teacher, she left Microsoft in the late 1990s to try to turn the script for her first feature film Saving Face into a film, giving herself a five-year window. Production had begun when she reached the fifth year. In 2001, the script for Saving Face won the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment screenwriting award.

Alice Wu was born San Jose, California to parents who were immigrants from Taiwan. Her family eventually moved to Los Altos, California, where she graduated from Los Altos High School in 1986. She enrolled in Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of 16. She later transferred to Stanford University, where she received her B.S. in Computer Science in 1990 and her master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford in 1992. Before becoming a filmmaker, Wu worked as a software engineer for Microsoft in Seattle.

Alice Wu (Chinese: 伍思薇 ; born April 21, 1970) is an American film director and screenwriter.