Painter, writer and performance artist The Maw Naing was born in Mingyan, Myanmar in 1971. He took up painting after studying computer science in Singapore. Group multimedia shows, solo shows and six anthologies of poetry followed. His first film Again and Again was created during the Yangon Film School’s first filmmaking workshop in 2005. This short documentary, based on one of The Maw Naing’s own poems and filmed in a glass factory in Yangon, went on to screen at numerous festivals and museums internationally, winning an award at Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. His second YFS film Are Not As … explored the confluence of film, performance art and political commentary; a third, Between the Pages (2010), is in the permanent collection at the Fukuoka Museum in Japan. The Maw Naing is a co-director (with Aung Min and Ko Ju) of The Clinic which screened at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2013. After studying at YFS, he took up studies in directing at the FAMU in Prague where he developed his first fiction feature film, The Monk (co-written by YFS Tutor Aung Min) in 2014. The film screened to acclaim at many major international festivals including Karlovy Vary, Busan, Rotterdam and Locarno. The Maw Naing was co-director of the first feature-length documentary from Myanmar, Nargis – when time stopped breathing, which also screened widely at festivals, picking up the FIPRESCI award in Mumbai, India. His latest feature The Women portrays a group of women who rise up against the injustice they face at the Yangon factory where they work.