SAG-AFTRA Actor & Emmy-Nominated Journalist

Crystal Bui is a SAG-AFTRA actor and Emmy-nominated former television news reporter, based between Los Angeles and Atlanta.

She spent nearly a decade on camera reporting live for NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliates in New York City, Atlanta, and Minneapolis, after beginning her career in newsrooms in Hawaii and Yakima, Washington. Her reporting was recognized with the Society of Professional Journalists award for Best Live Breaking News Coverage in 2014, for solo coverage of a near-fatal SWAT standoff, and she was voted Best Female News Reporter by Rhode Island Monthly readers in both 2017 and 2018.

That background shapes the work. Live television requires landing a moment in one take, under pressure, with no second pass — and it shows up in Crystal Bui’s acting as precision, presence, and stillness that holds.

Her feature debut in Tyler Perry’s Duplicity reached #1 on Amazon Prime Video, playing a news reporter in a high-stakes case grounded in the world she actually worked in. She has since co-starred in Hulu’s Reasonable Doubt, directed by Pete Chatmon, and BET+ and Paramount+’s All the Queen’s Men, with additional roles premiering this year.

She trained in on-camera technique at Margie Haber Studio and in comedy with Lesly Kahn, and works with acting coach Tania Nolan, who coached Emmy- and Golden Globe nominee Cooper Koch for Netflix’s Monsters.

Fluent in Vietnamese and a former Junior Olympic competitive swimmer, Crystal Bui is most often cast as journalists, anchors, attorneys, detectives, and high-level professionals, and gravitates toward stories built on identity, authority, and internal conflict.

Off camera, she is the founder of Spotlight Communications Group, where she trains executives, legal teams, and public figures for high-stakes media moments, and is a professional keynote speaker for Fortune 500 companies, universities, and national organizations including Baker Donelson law firm, the University of Alabama, Sigma-Aldrich Co., the Asian American Psychological Association, and San Diego State University.