Rea Tajiri is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates installation, documentary and experimental films. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialog and reflection around buried histories.
Her 2018 multisite installation WATARIDORI- was a collage across time and space, that activates real and speculative histories of the Japanese Americans who arrived in Philadelphia from US concentration camps during World War II. LORDVILLE her film from 2014 reins in stories of the everyday — powerful floods, ancestral secrets and colonial violence — to probe the material and immaterial traces of a town’s history. Her current feature documentary, WISDOM GONE WILD, explores a person-centered approach to caregiving during her sixteen year journey as a care partner to her mother who lived with dementia.
Tajiri's work has been included in several Whitney Biennials, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She won the International Documentary Distinguished Achievement Award for her film History and Memory and her feature film Strawberry Fields won the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian International Film Festival. Other festivals where she has screened her work include the Venice Film Festival, Film Festival Rotterdam, Seattle International Film Festival, and the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. Her film History and Memory screened on PBS national broadcast and has travelled to over 250 venues around the world.
Tajiri has been awarded several fellowships including the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Leeway Transformation Award, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Previously, she was also awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the NEA Visual Arts Fellowship.
Tajiri is a Sansei who grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago and Van Nuys, California. She graduated with her MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts. Tajiri teaches documentary filmmaking and is an Associate Professor in the Film Media Arts Department at Temple University.