Rachel DeWoskin


Rachel DeWoskin is an American actress and author. She is a 2012 recipient of the Alex Awards.

Early life and education

DeWoskin was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she attended the alternative Community High School. The daughter of a Sinology professor at the University of Michigan, she majored in English and studied Chinese at Columbia University in New York City.

Career

Acting

She went to Beijing in 1994 to work as a public-relations consultant and later starred in a Chinese nighttime soap opera, the hugely successful Foreign Babes in Beijing, which was watched by approximately 600 million viewers. DeWoskin played the character of Jiexi. As Reuters noted, the show was a "sort of Chinese counterpart to Sex and the City revolving around Chinese-Western culture clashes." At the time, she was one of the few foreign actresses working in mainland China and was considered a sex symbol.

Writing

DeWoskin returned to the United States in 1999 and earned a master's degree in poetry from Boston University. In 2005, W. W. Norton published her memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. The New Yorker commented that "DeWoskin's cleverly layered account thus charts parallel culture clashes, one that she experiences as a Western woman in modern China, and the other, a TV-ready version of the first, tailored to Chinese expectations." Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights, and the project remains in production. The director and screen adaptor attached to the film is Alice Wu.
DeWoskin is also the author of five novels, Big Girl Small, Repeat After Me, Blind, Some Day We Will Fly and Banshee.
DeWoskin is married to playwright Zayd Dohrn, son of Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers. They have two daughters, Dalin and Light. She is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Chicago.