Domee Shi

Shi was born on 8 September 1989 in Chongqing, Sichuan (now Chongqing municipality) as an only child before immigrating to Canada at the age of two with her parents. She spent six months in Newfoundland before moving to Toronto, where she grew up learning about art from her father. She was influenced by her father, who had been a college professor of fine arts and a landscape painter in China. Shi took inspiration and guidance from her mother's personality when directing Bao and Turning Red. Shi recalls that "My Chinese mom was always making sure I never wandered away too far, that I was safe." One such moment, that eventually made its way into Turning Red, was when Shi was in her adolescence: at a time when she wanted to fit in with her peers, Shi and her friends were together at school when one of them spotted Shi's mother lurking behind a tree, making sure Shi was doing alright. During her childhood, Shi watched many Studio Ghibli and Disney films, which exposed her to Asian cinema and animation.

As a high school student, Shi watched anime, read manga, and became the Vice President of her school's anime club. She joined online art communities and uploaded her fan artwork to DeviantArt. This became her first exposure to an environment of like-minded people that helped her establish a network with other artists. "I could follow artists, and I could email them. In the past, you'd have to be in California or know a guy who was friends with this other guy that worked at Disney or something," said Shi. Thus Shi was inspired to enroll at Sheridan College for her post-secondary education.

At Sheridan, Shi studied animation, graduating in 2011. During her second year at Sheridan, she enrolled in a course taught by Nancy Beiman, whose class she credits for her pursuit of storyboarding. Shi created a short film for an assignment during her last year at Sheridan. In 2009, she undertook an internship with Chuck Gammage Animation as a clean-up artist, inbetweener, storyboard artist, and animator.After graduating, Shi worked briefly as a cartooning instructor with an emphasis on character design and comic book creation. In 2011, she accepted a three-month internship at Pixar as a storyboard artist. This was her second attempt (her father was the one who encouraged her to apply again), having initially been turned down by the animation studio and others, such as Disney and DreamWorks. On her internship at Pixar and eventually full-time job, Shi states, "I felt that my voice was valued early on in my career, which is rare." Shi wrote an animated webcomic series titled My Food Fantasies in 2014, in which she drew "outlandish" situations involving food. Shi later said that she developed her interest in writing stories about food while making My Food Fantasies. The first feature film she worked on with Pixar was Inside Out (2015), on which she served as a storyboard artist. After briefly working on The Good Dinosaur, Shi began working on Toy Story 4 in 2015. She also drew storyboards for the 2018 film Incredibles 2, where she worked on a sequence featuring the characters Jack-Jack and Edna Mode.

On her career as a Chinese Canadian female director, Shi says that through her work as a filmmaker, she strives for the industry to reach the point where people are identified first as artists, and second by gender and ethnicity, stating that it gets old fast when she gets asked how it feels to be an Asian woman. "My first identity is that I'm a nerd! I just wanted to make something that I could nerd out about with my colleagues and friends, and share with other nerdy people around the world."