Rea Tajiri

Tajiri continues to live and work in Philadelphia. She works in the Division of Theater, and is a teacher of documentary production. Tajiri was promoted to Associate Professor in Film Media Arts at Temple University in 2017, she has taught at Ithaca College, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and SUNY Purchase. Currently, Tajiri is working on a documentary feature entitled Wisdom Gone Wild, a film which details her sixteen-year journey as a caregiver for her mother who had dementia. For this film, she received an ITVS Diversity Development Grant and the CAAM Documentary Fund Award.

Rea Tajiri is a Japanese American video artist, filmmaker and screenwriter, known for her personal essay film History and Memory (1991), dramatic narrative feature Strawberry Fields (1997) and experimental documentary Lordville (2014).

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) was Tajiri's personal essay documentary about the Japanese American internment. It premiered at the 1991 Whitney Biennial and won the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association. It also was awarded a Special Jury Prize: "New Visions Category" at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1992, and won "Best Experimental Video," Atlanta Film and Video Festival, 1992. In 1993 she made Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice, a documentary about the Nisei Japanese American human rights activist. Tajiri co-produced the documentary with Pat Saunders.

Tajiri's video art has been included in the 1989, 1991, and 1993 Whitney Biennials. She has also been exhibited at The New Museum for Contemporary Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archives. Tajiri is a 2015 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

"Tajiri often focuses her inquiry on the representation of Asians and Asian-Americans in popular media. In Off Limits (1988), she critiques Hollywood's portrayal of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people, juxtaposing fragments from Easy Rider with her own text to give voice to a Vietnamese character. In History and Memory (1990), Tajiri examines the construction of history and the manipulation of collective memory through a powerful pastiche of personal reminiscences and mass media images of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II." Electronic Art Intermix

She moved to New York in 1979, where she was involved with The Kitchen art center.

She partnered with Japanese Canadian author Kerri Sakamoto to write a coming-of-age story about a Japanese American girl in 1970s Chicago, resulting in Strawberry Fields. It was shot in 1994 with funding from CPB, NEA, and ITVS. The film stars Suzy Nakamura, James Sie, Chris Tashima and Takayo Fischer, and was completed in 1997, screening at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the Los Angeles Film Festival. It also was selected to the Venice International Film Festival and won the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival.

Tajiri's father, Vincent Tajiri, was the photo editor for Playboy Magazine during the 1950s and 1960s. He served in the 442nd Infantry Regiment during World War II. Her uncle, Shinkichi Tajiri, was a prominent sculptor who resided in the Netherlands.