Hope Anderson was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Tokyo, where her early exposure to film ran the gamut from samurai dramas to anime to Hollywood movies dubbed into Japanese. A childhood visit to Thailand inspired her first documentary, "Jim Thompson, Silk King," a biography of the Delaware-born Thai silk magnate whose disappearance in 1967 remains unsolved. Written, directed and produced by Anderson, who filmed on location in Thailand, France, England and the United States, the film won Best Documentary at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival in 2001. A companion piece, "The Jim Thompson House and Art Collection," explored the art and architecture of Thompson's landmark residence in Bangkok, now a museum. Both documentaries were broadcast on France's Channel 5 in 2004.

Before turning to film, Anderson read History and East Asian Studies at Wellesley, where she won the History prize and graduated magna cum laude, and at Harvard, where she was a Visiting Undergraduate Scholar. After leaving graduate school at UC-Berkeley, she ran the Japan and Korea desk at The Asia Foundation in San Francisco. Upon moving to Los Angeles, she read scripts at CAA, wrote freelance and worked as a copywriter at various video companies. She studied film at UCLA Extension and the International Documentary Association and was a guest lecturer on documentary filmmaking at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. She began her company, Hope Anderson Productions, in 1999 and now resides in Beachwood Canyon, under the Hollywood Sign.