Lay Thida was born in 1983 in Loikaw, Kayah state in eastern Myanmar. An English graduate of Taunggyi University, she joined the very first YFS  course in 2005. A regular sound recordist on YFS productions, her directorial debut Just A Boy earned her a Heinrich Boell Foundation Documentary Award in 2007. Her subsequent work includes portraits of an ex-poppy grower (A Farmer’s Tale, 2007), a young development worker (The Change Maker, 2008), and a hard-hitting documentary about domestic violence in Shan State (Unreported Story, 2011). In 2010, she received a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship to attend a documentary course at the National Film and Television School in the United Kingdom, which culminated in the production of a short documentary, Wrong Side Up. A Fulbright scholar, she took an MA in Development in International Policy Studies in Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California in 2013 before returning to Myanmar in 2015 where she continued to make films for a range of clients in the development sector. Alongside her work as a filmmaker, Lay Thida also co-founded and ran an NGO, Better Life.