Brendan Davis

Brendan Davis is a writer-director-producer working internationally in film & TV. He began his entertainment career in Atlanta in 1990, moved to Los Angeles in 2002, and has split his time between Beijing and Los Angeles since 2013. Davis has been a producer on films premiering, competing, or winning at Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, and other festivals. In 2013 Davis produced the first Los Angeles-based season of Chinese TV hit "Jia Pian You Yue" for CCTV-6, featuring Stan Lee, Justin Lin, M. Night Shyamalan, Sean Astin, and others. He is a former Producing faculty member at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, served a year as Chairman of Adamas Film International in Beijing, and has guest lectured at the Beijing Film Academy. In 2018 he wrote and directed the documentary "Yibin: An Elemental Journey" for CCTV. In 2019 he and director Eric Raine completed a 5-year journey making feature documentary CrazyHot, about the world of ultra hot chile peppers, now available on VOD worldwide. Davis is in pre-production on Paris-based feature film My Favorite Season and producing a documentary on US-China relations with writer-director Larry Sullivan, cinematographer Naeem Seirafi, and partners. In addition to his film efforts, Davis co-created the "How China Works" podcast with Yingying Li. Davis has also made public and media appearances discussing the intersection of China and Hollywood in particular and has been a speaker and consultant regarding East-West issues in general. Davis' 2019 public engagements included live "How China Works" events with Yingying Li in Beijing as well as at Stanford University, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and at Onepiece Work in downtown San Francisco. He moderated a panel at the 2019 Horasis China Meeting in Las Vegas on "The Future of China's Belt & Road Initiative" and was set to moderate a panel at the Horasis Global Meeting in Cascais, Portugal in 2020 on the topic of "Fulfillment" that was canceled due to Covid-19. Before leaving China, he was a live-stream guest on "China Plus America"'s web TV show as the subject of a 90-minute feature interview and was a guest host on China Radio International's top program "Round Table". On June 22, 2020, Davis moderated a live panel discussion at the virtual Horasis India Meeting on the topic of "India's March Into Modernism", with leading experts from India's politics, economics, tech, women's rights, and public health sectors. On July 26, 2020 he returned to "China Plus America", this time remotely from Los Angeles. On October 1, 2020, Davis moderated a panel at the inaugural Horasis Extraordinary Meeting on the topic of "Populism versus Multilateralism", and on March 18 he joined a panel making the case for a UBI in the US at the 2021 Horasis Extraordinary Meeting. In December 2019, Davis was recognized for his cross-cultural leadership in China by being appointed to serve as a Distinguished Special Foreign Expert with the Beijing Global Talent Exchange Association. His appointment as an advisor runs through 2024.