Yin Lichuan, a graduate of Peking University's Spanish Department, studied film in France. She is an important female poet of China's avant-garde poetry during the millennium.

She is the screenwriter of Zhang Yimou’s film Under the Hawthorn Tree (2010) and has written and directed films including The Park (Shanghai IFF, 2007) and Knitting (Director's Fortnight, 2008). Her 2024 feature Like a Rolling Stone became one of the most widely discussed feminist works in contemporary Chinese cinema that year.