Rea Tajiri

Rea Tajiri is a Japanese American video artist and filmmaker. The daughter of Vincent Tajiri, a prominent photo editor at Playboy during the 1950s and ’60s, she was raised in Chicago before leaving home to attend the California Institute of the Arts. After graduating, Tajiri worked as a producer on various film and video projects in Los Angeles and New York, gaining international acclaim for her 1991 film HISTORY AND MEMORY: FOR AKIKO AND TAKASHIGE, which premiered at the 1991 Whitney Biennial and won the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, among other awards. In 1993, Tajiri collaborated with Pat Saunders on production of the documentary YURI KOCHIYAMA: PASSION FOR JUSTICE, about the Nisei Japanese American human rights activist. She has also worked with Canadian author Kerri Sakamoto on STRAWBERRY FIELDS (1994), which screened at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Venice International Film Festival, and won the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival.

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. She has taught filmmaking at Temple University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and SUNY Purchase, and continues to live and work in New York. (10/09)

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige
A film by Rea Tajiri, 1991, 32 min., Color/BW
Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among th...

Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice
A film by Pat Saunders and Rea Tajiri, 1994, 57 min., Color
Yuri Kochiyama is a Japanese American woman who has lived in Harlem for more than 40 years with a long history of activism on a wide range of issues. ...