Benefitted by her own happily determined mug, Jennifer 8. Lee is out to make sure the world's rising array of emojis captures all types of people and cultures. As Co-founder of Emojination, she’s helped oversee the design and introduction of not only the somewhat famous dumpling emoji—but pictures heralding inter-racial coupledom, the Muslim hijab and the South American herbal drink mate. “We want the emoji (menu) to show an inclusive and diverse world,” she says. “We don't just need representation on the big screen, but on the little screen too.”

Her work is revealed in the upcoming documentary Picture Character, a global history of pictographs—from simple drawings to digital imagery—that premiered last April at the Tribeca Film Festival (Click here to see trailer). Among the revelations: One centuries-old Chinese character for “good” is "a woman with a baby boy,” says a dismayed Lee. “And the definition of wicked is three women together!”

If you had to pick a single emoji to nutshell Lee, one of those flying, burning comets would suffice. Born in New York City and raised in Harlem by Chinese immigrants who left Taiwan (dad worked as a Wall Street computer programmer, mom raised her and her two siblings), she grew up a potent mix of brainy and creative. "I was a very rambunctious kid," she says with a self-knowing laugh. After passing the tough test to get into Manhattan’s Hunter College Campus School—often ranked the top public high school in the U.S.—she headed to Harvard to study applied math and economics (she's also Vice President of The Harvard Crimson). Next stop: Studying international relations for a year at China’s Beijing University.

From there, just like any comet worth its firepower, she made shedding light her main thrust. Back in NYC, she spent most of the 2000s as a staffer at The New York Times, reporting on everything from police shootings to art work honoring victims of sex trafficking (one of her lighter articles, about straight guys bonding, was optioned and turned into 2009’s Paul Rudd comedy I Love You, Man). In 2012, she helped create NewsDiffs, a website charting news outlets' sometimes questionable edits to posted stories. In 2017, banding with nonprofit media watchdog groups, she founded the fact-checking event-series MisinfoCon. Somehow, she also finds time to advise the popular issues-oriented website Upworthy and is on the board of Hacks/Hackers, an alliance of grassroots journalists.

And Picture Character, directed by Martha Shane and Ian Cheney, isn’t Lee’s first doc project. In her 2009 bestseller, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, she delved into immigrant abuse at America’s Chinese restaurants (she also revealed that the fortune cookie actually hails from Japan). Not only did that book earn her a chat with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, it inspired her to coproduce 2014's The Search for General Tso, about the name behind that ever-popular Chinese chicken dish. Today, her main gig is running Plympton, an innovation-minded “literary studio” that produces everything from VR versions of literary novels to serialized digital books, read via the fiction-lovers’ newsletter Daily Lit and its companion Rooster iPhone app—both of which she helped create. Exhausted face!