Mark Leong

Mark Leong is a fifth-generation Chinese-American from Sunnyvale, California. After graduating from Harvard in 1988 with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies, he received a Gardner Fellowship to photograph the following year in China. In 1992, he was in residency at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, sponsored by the Lila Wallace Foundation. Beijing became his long-term base in 1997, from which he photographed throughout Asia. In 2003, he joined Redux Pictures. His book China Obscura was published in 2004.

He is a contributing photographer for National Geographic, and his stories have appeared in Time, Fortune, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Smithsonian. Honors include the National Endowment for the Arts, Fifty Crows, the Overseas Press Club, and the Open Society Foundation. In 2010, he was named the Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year for his coverage of the Asian wildlife trade. Shows include Carpenter Visual Arts Center, San Francisco Arts Commission, Leica Gallery Frankfurt, China National Museum, and Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture Shenzhen.

After more than two decades in China, he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area where he now lives.