Renee Tajima-Peña

Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker whose work addresses Asian American communities and immigrant/diaspora themes. Her film credits include Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988), My America… or Honk if You Love Buddha (1997), Skate Manzanar (2001), Labor Women (2002), Mexico Story of The New Americans (2004), and Calavera Highway (2008). She recently launched two web interactive projects, Heart Mountain 3.0 and Mas Bebes? Interactive. Her films have been screened at the Cannes, London, Sundance, South by Southwest, and Toronto film festivals, and broadcast around the world. Her previous honors include the Broad Fellowship from United States Artists, the Alpert Award in the Arts, a Peabody Award, a Dupont-Columbia Award, the International Documentary Association Achievement Award, and fellowships in media arts from the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Foundation on the Arts. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. At UC Santa Cruz, Renee Tajima-Peña was a professor of Film & Digital Media, affiliated faculty in Digital Arts and New Media and Feminist Studies, and co-graduate director of Social Documentation, a program that she helped to launch in 2005.