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Born in Beijing, China just after the Cultural Revolution, Miao Wang immigrated with her parents at the age of 13 to Boston. She entered eighth grade without speaking any English. In 1999, Miao graduated from the University of Chicago with an honors degree in Economics.

Miao soon moved to New York, where she found constant sources of creative inspiration. She began to shift her interests toward and to pursue photography, design, and film. In 2001, she formed a small art collective called UrbanEtc with two friends. Together, they produced two successful large-scale art exhibitions/happenings that involved 97 young artists. The theme-driven shows-“Machinery” in 2000 and “Nostalgia” in 2001-took place in a large warehouse in Long Island City. In 2002, UrbanEtc decided to make something more permanent. They took the leap to making a book with the same concept as the art shows. Miao lived in Berlin for two months while she designed her first art book, Overkill. The group took a laptop presentation of the just-completed book on a whim to the Frankfurt Book Fair. That same day, Edward Booth-Clibborn offered to publish the book on Booth-Clibborn Editions. UrbanEtc organized a successful Berlin exhibition of the artwork in Overkill in 2002 and held a book launch party at the New Museum in New York in 2003.

That year, Miao contacted her favorite graphic designer, Stefan Sagmeister, after realizing that Booth-Clibborn Editions also published his book, Made You Look. This led to a highly sought-after three-month internship at his small New York studio, where Miao designed several projects under StefanÕs art direction. A wedding invitation card that she designed received a Certificate of Design Excellence in Print Magazine's Regional Design Annual 2004. A Copy Magazine spread she worked on was nominated for the prestigious D&AD Design Awards 2004. Miao was also nominated in that year's Print Magazine New Visual Artists Review.

In 2003, Miao entered the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design. She received her degree in May 2005. In the past two years, Miao has designed and produced six websites and two album covers. She has also acquired skills in digital video technologies and non-linear editing. Miao was as an assistant at Transformer Films, where she worked on post-production of a program called “Blood and Memory” that aired on National Geographic TV. She also worked as an assistant at Maysles Films, the studio of the legendary direct-cinema documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. She edited a documentary style promotional video—Linked Hybrid—for the renowned architect Steven Holl's large residential housing complex in Beijing. Currently, Miao is working as a print and web design freelancer at Harry N. Abrams, the large illustrated books publisher. In addition, she works on other freelance design projects in her own studio. Miao is promoting her first short documentary film, Yellow Ox Mountain, which reflects on the personal transformations and creative turning points of two contemporary Chinese artists of the Cultural Revolution generation now living in New York City. She just edited another short film Luminosity Porosity for Steven Holl Architect, an avant-garde lyrical film contemplating light and porosity in his architecture, and a feature-length documentary for independent filmmaker Joseph Jacoby, with cinematography by Albert Maysles. She is also currently shooting the first stage of her next film in Beijing, a documentary that captures a city under transformations through the eyes of Beijing taxi drivers.