Rea Tajiri

Rea Tajiri is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates installation, documentary and experimental films. She grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with her BFA and MFA degrees in Post-Studio Art. Tajiri’s work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialog and reflection around buried histories. Her early video art shorts were exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally including the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, the Guggenheim, The New Museum, The Kitchen, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Yamagata Documentary Festival, and Artists Space. A recent video assemblage was included in the exhibit Legacies: Asian American Arts Movements 1969-2001 at 80WSE Gallery at NYU; her documentary feature Wisdom Gone Wild, screened on the PBS docu series POV and in International Competition at IDFA. To date, the film has won seven awards including the Audience Award at Blackstar for Best Documentary. In 2024, Tajiri was selected for a NorthStar Fellowship to be in residence at Camden International Film Festival 2024 and the William Greaves Seminar 2025 at Stanford University. NorthStar supports the development of her latest project Non-Alien. Funders for Tajiri's work include JustFilms, Ford Foundation; a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the 2022 Chicken and Egg Award, CAAM Documentary Fund; and an ITVS Diversity Development Fund. She has been a recipient of the Leeway Transformation Award , the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship and two New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a recent recipient of both a 2025 USA Artist’s Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video.