Anastasia Lin

Lin's father is the CEO of a large company that supplies medical equipment, Samsung cellphones, and other products in China; he owned a chain of 50 hotpot restaurants, before selling them during the SARS crisis.

In China, Lin's mother was a university professor who taught Western economics and international finance, and was the reason that Lin eventually left the country. "My mother thought a western education would be better for me ... I'm more of an outgoing, opinionated person," Lin said in an interview with Macleans.

She characterizes her mother as a "tiger mom" who put her through elementary school two years early and forced her to learn classical piano as a child. "Every day at 6 a.m she hiked up a mountain, at the peak of which her mother would have her shout English vocabulary words to improve her enunciation." It was from the same mountaintop that Lin and her mother would be able to catch the signal of Voice of America, which is typically banned in China.

Lin went to high school in Vancouver before moving to Toronto. After learning about the Tiananmen Massacre and the persecution of Falun Gong, she began talking to dissidents herself. "It really shocked me. I wanted to do something for them. I heard their stories and I wanted to portray the hopelessness they have that nobody is listening."Since she began acting at age 15, Lin has appeared in films and television productions, and most prominently played lead roles in several films about human rights themes in China.

In 2008, she portrayed a student killed in a poorly built school that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake. In 2011 she was lead actress in Beyond Destiny, which won the Golden Palm Award at the Mexico International Film Festival and the Award of Merit at the Indie Fest in California. In 2014-17 she was lead actress in the satirical TV series Big Shorts. The same year she starred in the Swedish film Red Lotus.

The Bleeding Edge (2016), from the creators of the Peabody Award-winning film Human Harvest, is a thriller based on real-life events where she plays a victim of human-rights abuses in China. The film was released on April 11, 2016. She won the 2016 Leo Award for Best Female Lead Performance in a TV Movie. In 2022, she starred in Unsilenced, a Canadian drama about the Chinese government's repression of the Falun Gong movement.

When asked why she acts in productions about human-rights issues, she said: "There aren't a lot of Chinese actresses who really dare to participate in these kinds of projects. They all know the risk of not getting a visa to go back to China, or having family members harassed. I just felt these stories must be heard."