Rea Tajiri is an award-winning documentary director and producer, currently living in Philadelphia. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialog and reflection around buried histories. For more than three decades, her films have influenced a generation of filmmakers and artists and have been included in Asian American studies, documentary studies and women’s and gender studies curricula across the US. Tajiri has been recognized with a Chicken and Egg Award in 2023, a NorthStar Fellowship at the Camden International Film Festival in 2024, and both a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and a USA Artists Fellowship in 2025. In 2026, she was invited to join the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She is currently in pre-production on a hybrid documentary feature NON-ALIEN. 
 

Tajiri has directed three documentary features including WISDOM GONE WILD (2022), LORDVILLE (2014), and PASSION FOR JUSTICE: YURI KOCHIYAMA (1993) – as well as several short films. WISDOM GONE WILD had a national broadcast on the PBS docu series POV, Season 36; it screened at the DOC NYC Film Festival and in International Competition at IDFA. To date, the film has won seven awards; including the Audience Award and Honorable Mention Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at Blackstar Film Festival, as well as the Grand Prix at the San Diego Asian American Film Festival in 2022. Her film LORDVILLE, screened in competition both at CAAMfest and VC Fest in 2014. It was included in the Yerba Buena exhibit AFTER LIFE (we survive). PASSION FOR JUSTICE: YURI KOCHIYAMA is currently in distribution through Women Make Movies and is part of the YURI KOCHIYAMA SOLIDARITY PROJECT. 

 

Tajiri’s dramatic feature film: STRAWBERRY FIELDS (1997) had its European premiere at the 54th Venice Film Festival and won the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian International Film Festival and was featured on the Criterion Channel. Tajiri’s documentary short HISTORY AND MEMORY: FOR AKIKO & TAKASHIGE, is cited as a groundbreaking and influential film in the documentary canon and is credited with a pioneering approach to the essay film. It premiered at the Whitney Biennial in 1991 and won an IDA Distinguished Achievement Award in 1992 along with three other awards. It is available through EAI, Women Make Movies and Video Data Bank.
 

Tajiri’s films have received support from the Ford Foundation; the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Leeway Transformation Award, the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, several NEA Visual Arts Fellowships and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Tajiri has worked extensively throughout the U.S. as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence, and is currently a full Professor in the Theater, Film and Media Arts department at Temple University, Philadelphia.