Mark Leong is a fifth-generation Chinese American, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating from Harvard in 1988, he traveled to China on an art fellowship, and ended up living in Beijing until 2017, working as a documentary photographer.
He became a contributing photographer for National Geographic in 2004, and has also published photo stories in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Fortune, NPR and Smithsonian. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, Fifty Crows, the Open Society Foundation, the Lila Wallace Foundation, CENTER Santa Fe and the British Natural History Museum.
Since returning to the Bay Area, he has been photographing more local stories, as well as doing some occasional writing.
