Cary Joji Fukunaga

While the Writer’s Strike marches on with no end in sight affecting over 20,000 writers in the Writers Guild of America, one such writer is Albert Kim, showrunner, Executive Producer and writer of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sleepy Hollow, and Nikita. For Kim, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Historically, the landscape of successful Asians behind the camera has been sparse. Among the few who peopled this landscape, however, there have been standouts – famously, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, who helmed over thirty films in his career during the mid-1900s, and is often cited as the inspiration for the work of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas.