May Thyn Kyi was born in Yangon to parents from the Rakhine and Inn ethnic groups in western Myanmar and central Shan State respectively. Frustrated by constraints for women working in journalism, she left reporting and presenting jobs to work in communications for various NGOs. Her interest in visual storytelling was sparked after attending a National Geographic Photo Camp in 2018. Eager to learn more about the moving image, she joined Yangon Film School in 2020 and made her first documentary Shifting Sands. This portrait of two sisters fighting for workers’ rights in the factories that have sprung up on the outskirts of Yangon won Best Documentary Short award at the Tiburon International Film Festival in the US and was nominated for awards at five of the other 11 film festivals where it has subsequently screened. Being Mon is her graduation film. May Thyn Kyi also takes part in artistic ventures, such as the Goethe Institute Myanmar’s RECONNECT and Myanmar Photo Archive projects. In 2022 she was selected to attend a Purin Pictures short film camp in Thailand where her first fiction film project Sunset was nominated for Platform Busan 2023. The project went on to win a grant from MEMORY! Short Film Fund and was completed in 2024.