Eva Chen (editor)

Chen grew up in New York. Her parents, who are originally from Taipei and Shanghai, own a consulting textile import-export business, and Chen attributes her early love of fashion to her mother's influence.[5] Chen attended the Brearley School,[5] then went to college at Johns Hopkins University where she was pre-med.[6]

In college, Chen interned for fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. After graduating from Hopkins in 2001, she worked briefly for Cravath, Swaine & Moore before joining the then-recently launched shopping magazine Lucky, where she worked in the credits department logging the prices and sellers for the magazine's array of products and eventually became editor-in-chief. She next moved to Elle where she worked in the beauty department for three years before she became beauty editor of Teen Vogue.[7]

At Lucky, Chen was the youngest editor-in-chief in the magazine's history.[8] She also became the first head of a commercial arm for the publication, Lucky Shops, serving as both editor-in-chief for the magazine and chief creative officer.[9]

In July 2015, Chen joined Instagram, owned by Facebook, to develop partnerships with fashion brands.[10] She is presently Head of Fashion Partnerships for the social media platform, and has launched a number of fashion and e-commerce features at Instagram, including shopping fashion looks directly from influencers' feeds[11] and the Instagram Shop account.[12]

Chen with illustrator Derek Desierto signing books at BookCon in 2019

Chen is also a book author[13] and has written four children's books. The first three were illustrated by Derek Desierto: Juno Valentine and the Magical Shoes (2018), A Is for Awesome: 23 Iconic Women Who Changed the World (2019), Juno Valentine and the Fantastic Fashion Adventure (2019), and the fourth, Roxy the Last Unisaurus Rex (2020), which was illustrated by Matthew Riviera.[14][15]

On May 27, 2020, Chen gave remarks at her alma mater Johns Hopkins University's Commencement ceremony.[16]

In 2000, Chen studied abroad for a year in England at Oxford, where she met her husband, Thomas Bannister.[17] Chen and Bannister have two children, born in 2015 and 2017.[18]