Hsu Pan Naing was born in Yangon in 1997. The daughter of a writer, she grew up surrounded by the books of her mother and many other writers and soon fell in love with storytelling. After graduating in journalism, she was hired by The Myanmar Times as a video journalist. Keen to explore the moving image further, she gave up her job to attend the Yangon Film School in 2020, and has since worked in various roles including sound recordist on The Singing Bookman (Dir. Nan Cho Lae Yee Thein) and camera assistant on fellow-student Kaung Swar Thar’s Pilikan – A Hindu Temple in Thanylin in Myanmar. Her first brush with animation was Reborn, a short film she co-created with other students during a YFS Animation & Mixed Media course in 2021. Developed at a time when the pandemic and the military coup made independent filmmaking in Myanmar more challenging than ever, her first film as a director – the animated documentary Dear Daughter – was almost two years in the making. She has since directed her first short fiction Lost Girl, based on a script funded by Myanmar Script Fund, and is currently developing a personal documentary about her novelist mother.