Renee Tajima-Peña

Renee Tajima-Peña
Born	1958 Chicago, Illinois, US
Residence	Los Angeles, California, US
Alma mater	Harvard University
Occupation	Documentary filmmaker, Professor

Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated American filmmaker whose work focuses on immigrant communities, race, gender and social justice. Her directing and producing credits include the documentaries, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, and Labor Women.

Biography

Tajima-Peña attended John Muir High School in Altadena, California and later received her bachelor's degree cum laude from Harvard Radcliffe College where she majored in East Asian Studies and sociology. While at Harvard, she was chairperson of the United Front Against Apartheid.^[1]

Tajima-Peña has been deeply involved in the Asian American independent film community as an activist, writer and filmmaker. She was the first paid director at Asian Cine-Vision in New York and a founding member of the Center for Asian American Media (formerly National Asian American Telecommunications Association. She was a film critic for The Village Voice, a cultural commentator for National Public Radio, and the editor of Bridge: Asian American Perspectives.

Teaching Career

In 2013, Tajima-Peña was appointed Professor of Asian American Studies and the Alumni and Friends of Japanese American Ancestry Endowed Chair at UCLA. She also directs the Center for EthnoCommunications at UCLA, housed in the Asian American Studies Center with a teaching component with the Asian American Studies Department.^[2] Tajima-Peña previously served as the Graduate Director of the Masters Program in Social Documentation as Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Honors

Her honors include an Academy Award nomination for Best Feature Documentary, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peabody Award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, the Alpert Award for Film/Video, the James Wong Howe “Jimmie” Award, the Justice in Action Award, and two International Documentary Association Achievement Awards (one shared), the Media Achievement Award from MANAA, the Steve Tatsukawa Memorial Award and the APEX Excellence in the Arts Award. She has twice earned Fellowships in Documentary Film from both the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Foundation on the Arts.

Her films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, London Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, New Directors/New Films, Redcat, San Francisco International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, Toronto International Film Festival, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial.

Her documentaries have been broadcast around the world, including BBC, CBC Canada, SBS Austrailia, Tokyo Broadcasting System, VPRO Netherlands, ZDF Germany, ABC, Home Box Office, Oxygen, Lifetime Television, the Sundance Channel, and PBS. ^[3]^[4] In 2009 she won a Fellow Award from United States Artists.^[5]

Selected Filmography

"Whatever It Takes" (executive producer)
"Calavera Highway" (director, producer, writer)
"The New Americans: Mexico Story" (PBS)
"My Journey Home" (executive producer, director)
"Skate Manzanar" (director, cinematographer)
"Labor Women" (producer, director, cinematographer)
"The Last Beat Movie" (director, producer, writer)
"My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha" (producer, director, writer)
"The Best Hotel on Skid Row" (producer, director, writer)
"Jennifer’s in Jail" (Lifetime Television)
"Declarations: All Men Are Created Equal?" (producer)
"What Americans Really Think of the Japanese" (Fujisankei)
"Yellow Tale Blues"
"Who Killed Vincent Chin?" (director, producer)

Current Work