Asian CineVision is a nonprofit media arts organization dedicated to promoting and preserving Asian and Asian American media expressions by:

• Helping to develop and support both emerging and experienced Asian American film and video makers and other media artists working in a range of genres and styles; and

• Helping to ensure that the full spectrum of Asian and Asian American media works reach diverse audiences in Asian American communities and beyond.

Grassroots media activists in New York's Chinatown founded ACV in 1976. At a time of exceptional energy and assertion on the part of diverse cultural groups, claiming their voices and places in a landscape that had been dominated by European Americans, ACV's founders saw the need to bring greater social and cultural awareness of Asian American experience and history to both Asian American communities and to the public at large. Moving-image media had become the nation's common language, its most pervasive source of images and ideas, and Asian Americans barely registered on its screens. ACV's founders wanted to address problems faced by Asian Americans in both representation in the media and access to the means of media production and distribution. Technologies and outlets for independent media were multiplying, creating new possibilities for Asian Americans both behind and in front of the cameras, in production and distribution, in scholarship and practice, in every style and platform of media arts.

When ACV first incorporated, its principal purpose was "to produce Chinese language television programs," but a few years later — reflecting the growth of an overarching, self-conscious Asian American identity and expanded needs for an Asian American media organization based in New York, the certificate of incorporation was amended to specify much larger purposes: "To produce and to exhibit films and video programs about the experience and culture of Asian and Asian American communities...," "to provide consultation and technical assistance for artists, cultural and media organizations," "to publish various documentation," and "to organize seminars, conferences and workshops..."

During its first twenty-five years, ACV grew in part by initiating its own programs and in part by seizing opportunities to save or adopt worthwhile projects formerly carried out by other groups (such as taking over the publication of Bridge magazine in 1981). ACV organized the first Asian American film festival in the U.S. in 1978. The annual National Festival Tour provided the seed-stock for most of the Asian American festivals that have sprung up in subsequent years around the country. ACV has also accomplished much to open exchange and introduce audiences to works from Asia and the Asian diaspora. At the peak of its funding and program activity, year-round activities included the annual Asian American International Film Festival and the national tour of Festival works, other exhibitions in film and video, media-production services for independent artists and producers in New York, publications including the quarterly journal CineVue, a print and media archive, and a range of training workshops.