A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Paul Kendel Fonoroff began studying Chinese in high school, continuing at Brown University and at Singapore’s Nanyang University.
In 1983 he moved to Hong Kong, where he remained for decades, hosting over a thousand television segments related to film (in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English), and appearing in over twenty movies.
[2] He authored over two thousand articles for an array of publications, primarily as movie columnist for Hong Kong's The South China Morning Post from the 1980s to the 2010s.
The collection was later showcased in Chinese Movie Magazines: From Charlie Chaplin to Chairman Mao 1951-1981, included in The New York Times selection of Best Art Books of 2018.
[3] In 2016, Fonoroff's collection was acquired by the University of California-Berkeley's CV Starr East Asian Library and christened the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection for Chinese Film Studies.