Reiko Tahara is an independent documentary filmmaker, educator, and translator. Her experimental documentary works have been exhibited widely across the states including at SXSW, Hawaii Int’l FF, Margaret Mead, NY Asian American FF, Walker Art Center, Pacific Film Archive, also internationally in Brazil, Sri Lanka, Japan, Canada, Singapore, etc. She has been a recipient of grants from NEA, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Asian American Media, among others, and several fellowships including the Emerging Artists Overseas program from the Japanese government and Andrew W. Mellon Transformative Learning in the Humanities at CUNY.

She is Co-founder and Programmer of the Uno Port Art Films (est. 2010), a summer outdoor film festival in Okayama, Japan, which showcases cutting edge independent films under the theme of “Life, Art, Film” with an emphasis on filmmakers from underrepresented world communities. She has degrees from Waseda University (Tokyo) and the New School (NYC), studied journalism at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a full year scholarship, and mentored under a legendary documentary professor-author Deirdre Boyle, and filmmakers Rea Tajiri and Alan Berliner. She has taught for 14 years at the New School, Temple Univ, City College, and regularly teaches at Hunter College (MFA in Integrated Media Arts), NYU, and DCTV. The courses taught include: documentary history/theory and criticism; documentary production; world cinema; Japanese cinema; fundraising for independent media; new currents in documentary; Asian culture (anthro-cinema hybrid); Third Cinema, and a new course Documenting histories, Asia, Asian-America.