Elaine Lai

Stories

Featured

Bellie

animated feature

On her eleventh birthday, the Lord of Death comes for Bellie’s mother and she chases him into another world to bring her back. There, Bellie and several mythical creatures must unite to face an Insatiable evil that started in the human world and has crossed over.

Otherwise

science fiction · novel

In a pleasure house where engineered humanoids fulfill the desires of the ultra-rich, a forbidden touch between two workers unlocks a stolen memory of love — and awakens something powerful enough to make them want to be free.

Past work

Bellie Meets the Lord of Death

animatic · writer and director · featured in the Rubin Museum’s Spiral Magazine, January 23, 2026

An animatic adapted from her feature-length screenplay about a girl who loses her mother on her eleventh birthday and tries to get her back from Lord Yama, the Lord of Death.

White Boy

feature-length coming-of-age drama · second round, 2023 Sundance Screenwriting Lab · workshopped at Stanford's Asian American Theater Project

Shame, childhood betrayal, and the price of upward mobility, through the eyes of a Chinese American girl.

Blue Lotus

audio play, 3 hours · 2021

A story of enlightenment in female form that challenges the conventional narrative associated with the Buddha.

Neighbors 鄰居

audio play, 2 hours · 2021

Three intertwining stories of queer Asian/Asian Americans who don’t fit into the dominant story of “America” or the Chinese American community.