Jamyang Kyi worked as a producer in the Tibetan-language section of state-run Qinghai TV for two decades. She is well-known among Tibetans as an activist on women’s issues and is a leading Tibetan writer, television producer, and performer. She was born in 1965 in the Amdo region of Tibet, and is married with two daughters.

Jamyang's music is influenced by modern folk music and traditional Tibetan music, she has presented programs in Tibetan state-run TV for more then 20 years. She has written about the fate of Tibetan woman and has published articles on education and inter-ethnic relations. She has travelled to the US, where in 2006 she performed and lectured, and there has been speculation that she was detained around the time of the 2008 Tibetan uprising as the authorities may have suspected that she had had contact with exiled Tibetan communities during this time.

On 1 April, reports stated that plainclothes state security officers escorted Jamyang Kyi from her office at state-owned Qinhai TV. The source said “she never returned, people were speculating that she was detained in a guesthouse for interrogation”. Anotehr source said "Security people went to Jamyang Kyi's house to search her computer, her mailing list, and contact numbers and took all these away,"

She said of her treatment in detention: “Each interrogation session aroused a different kind of fear in me. One day in the middle of an interrogation I thought instead of enduring this, it would be better to be killed by a single bullet. My family and relatives would grieve but as for me, I would have to suffer the pain only once”

Her detention demonstrates the Chinese authorities' growing fear of information access and internet communication, which Tibetans have used to great effect to share ideas, break news of protests, detentions and human rights abuses and to reach the outside world. Jamyang Kyi's blog is popular with the younger generation of Tibetans, who are gradually gaining more computer access and expertise. The site which hosted Jamyang Kyi's blog was closed down in March 2009. (Read more about internet censorship in Tibet here)

Jamyang Kyi's friendship with current prisoner Norzin Wangmo has been documented on the popular Tibetan blog 'High Peaks Pure Earth', which has published several letters sent from Jamyang Kyi to Norzin Wangmo.