This article is part of a column called Philly Profiles, which features in-depth profiles of local moving-image artists and cultural workers, including their body of work, inspirations, and upcoming projects. The column is written by cinéSPEAK Philly Cultural Critics Fellows.
From the time Lily Xie (who uses she and they pronouns) started animating, their craft has been steeped in socially engaged work. With a background in city planning and computer science, Xie facilitates creative projects that focus on racial justice, abolition, and the environment using animation, print media, and video. But with their recent work jaderabbitjaderabbit, Xie takes a step outside of their wheelhouse, marking their first solo personal project in their four years of animating.
jaderabbitjaderabbit debuted at the Philadelphia Animation Festival in November. The experimental short invites viewers into a time-warping chase among shape-shifting rabbits who transform and evolve through the mediums of paper cut-outs, shadow puppetry, pointillism, and more. In homage to Xie’s Chinese American heritage, the film opens with East Asian folkloric images representing the mythology of Jade Rabbit, who has been transported to the moon. Grinding a mortar and pestle in the sky, the rabbit soon emerges from the original drawing, becoming immersed into a contemporary world crafted via stop-motion.
Elaborating on their inspiration and process, Xie shares that the film was an opportunity to reflect on the life of their late grandmother. “She passed away in July of 2024 right after I moved to Philly,” Xie says. “For whatever reason, a memory that was really sticky for me was [one] of us finding a rabbit when I was a kid and lived with [my grandparents] for a brief period of time in Shanghai. And to me it’s a memory that makes no sense. Because why was there a rabbit in Shanghai, which is this extremely urban city…and so that is sort of what inspired everything.”
Xie felt called to explore her connection to Shanghai, her grandparents, and Chinese diaspora through the process of making jaderabbitjaderabbit. She shares, “[I was] feeling very griefy about my grandmother’s death, but also in general about the distance between me and my grandparents who live in China…Someone told me this phrase, diasporic memory…which is this feeling of longing to be with the people and the homeland that you’re ancestrally from, but not being able to do that because of distance, language, and time.”
With no clear destination or resolve, jaderabbitjaderabbit is visually meditative as Xie leaves the narrative abstract and open to the viewer’s perspective. “The days that I would feel really challenged to be like, ‘What is the story? Am I supposed to make it make sense? Is it supposed to not make sense?’ I would just go to the studio and make more rabbits,” Xie says. The stream-of-consciousness, process-oriented approach Xie takes with jaderabbitjaderabbit contrasts with her previous projects, which have been primarily collaborative and client-based.
During their studies in computer science at Wellesley College, Xie joined a program called Residence Lab, which was ultimately her gateway to organizing–the program connected artists and Boston residents to preserve Boston’s Chinatown.
Xie reflects, “They were teaching all of us [about] urban planning, how it shape[s] our communities. And they also taught us about the history of movement organizing in Chinatowns and grassroots Asian organizing…I think it was one of the first times that I felt this sense of connection with community, especially because the residents were involved.”
Xie went on to earn their master’s degree in city planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then, Xie has partnered with grassroots organizations such as the Boston Ujima Project, Roxbury Youth Programs (Boston), and the Mural Arts People’s Budget Office (Philadelphia), using animation as a tool for actualizing visions of the future or reactivating history and memory.
With the The Boston Ujima Project, Xie co-created an animated short film celebrating the lineages that laid the foundations for solidarity work. Xie shares, “We did a lot of interviews asking people, who is an ancestor that inspires you in this work? They can be related or not related, and if you could write a love letter to them, what would you say?” The interview recordings and the love letters became the material for the film called Love Letters For Our Ancestors. Xie affectionately remembers, “The final film was screened at an event that was coinciding with another film called Loving Men. So it was an event that ended up being all about love; all about the role that love plays in movement spaces, and how it’s this guiding factor in shaping our political realities.”
Xie draws the connection between their work with Boston Ujima Project and what she’s doing now in Philly. “The love letters project was really meaningful because through that I learned about solidarity economies, where people are pursuing social profit over money profit. Organizations like Boston Ujima Project, and there are so many places in Philly, are building solidarity economies that are about social wellness and everyone being able to access what they need.” Xie adds, “There’s a direct thread between that project and where I am now working for Philadelphia Cooperatives Alliance, which is an organization that supports cooperative businesses in the Philadelphia area.”
During a residency in 2022, Xie worked in Boston’s Department of Planning with an initiative to abolish the city’s Planning Agency under the direction of Mayor Michelle Wu. Xie explains, “There had been so much harm done by city planners in how they made the city less affordable, and how they caused racial segregation, and because of that, [Mayor Wu] wanted to abolish [the Planning Agency].” Xie continues, “The focus of that project was basically taking a page from abolitionist thinkers like Ruth Wilson Gilmore…who talk about how abolition is not about tearing down. It’s about imagining, building something new. So the question for the people was, ‘If you could build a new Department of Planning, what would it do?’ So that’s when I started working with a couple different groups of people. One of the groups was the Roxbury Youth Program.”
Roxbury is a historically Black working class neighborhood in Boston that has housed a lot of revolutionary Black thought over the years. Xie created animation using Roxbury high school students’ recorded responses as the voiceover and to inspire visuals. Xie says, “A lot of them talked about seeing their neighbors get priced out, feeling like there’s not enough space in Boston for things that they need to feel safe to play, to hang out with their friends.” Xie and co-animator Maria Fong gathered drawings and interview recordings from the young people to create If I Could Build Anything.
Xie moved to Philadelphia in 2024 with connections to the No Arena Chinatown Campaign and got involved in local organizing and the arts scene. Since then, they’ve participated in various installations with local galleries and nonprofit organizations like Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Vox Populi, Termite TV and Cherry Street Pier, and was an artist-in-residence with the Mural Arts People’s Budget Office.
Xie recognizes similar challenges within the Boston and Philly housing markets that lead to the displacement of local residents and families. Xie says, “I see a lot of overlap between what [Roxbury youth are] talking about and Philly…there’s not enough strong regulations to stop investors from a different country [from] buying a property in Philly and waiting for the market to rise so they can sell it for a profit, having done nothing to that property, which is called speculation.”
Of course, there are also notable differences between the two cities. Xie states, “Philly is a really different context than Boston. Philly is not as invested in its infrastructure…A big reason is Philly has not enough money. Well, I’ll say it’s not going to the right place. It has enough money. That $800 million police budget is taking up a lot of space.”
With the Mural Arts People’s Budget Office, Xie created a zine from researching the budget for police uniforms and equipment to reimagine an abolitionist set of tools for public safety. “The magazine that we ended up publishing was about breaking down the police budget. Like, where does the police budget actually go? There was a line item in this past budget season of about a million dollars for buying new uniforms for police. And that kind of blew my mind, because I was like, a million dollars…” Xie laughs as she imagines. “They’re all dripped out in Dolce and Gabbana.”
When asked what’s next creatively, Xie’s answer was two-fold. She says, “If I had unlimited space and time to play, I would do more animating outdoors.” Xie also seeks more solidarity work. “I would love to do more with other artists in Philly to see if we can figure out what alternative economies exist, where we can live abundantly, do freaky art stuff, and eat really good meals.” Xie was also recently awarded the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grant to work with Asian Americans United to produce a multimedia playbook that documents organizing strategies from the No Arena Chinatown campaign.
For Xie, animation is a practice in “push[ing] the boundaries of what’s possible”–a parallel process in the work of envisioning, actualizing, and mobilizing both visual and social concepts through to completion.
*Featured Image: Image of Lily Xie. Photo credit: Luiza Folegatti.
Caitlin Green is a Philly-based dance artist whose practice centers the body’s role in holistic wellness, catharsis, and socioemotional regulation. In addition to their work in choreography, performance, and education, they are a writer for the local dance publication thINKingDANCE and first-time director for the experimental dance film Eros: Fragile as it is Free. Caitlin is a 2025 cinéSPEAK Philly Cultural Critics Fellow.
