Vilsoni Hereniko

Vilsoni Hereniko is a Professor at the University of Hawaii’s Academy for Creative Media, where his research, teaching, and creative work focus on issues related to climate change, indigenous storytelling, cultural identity, and the politics of representation in all kinds of media. As an award-winning filmmaker and theater artist he is a writer/director. As an academic, his research integrates the scholarly and the creative. Hereniko’s book, "Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma", makes a compelling case for the use of objective as well as subjective perspectives in ethnographic research in order to capture the complexity of human nature and cultures. His co-edited book "Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific" examines the literatures and arts of Oceania in their social and political contexts as they pertain to identity formation. Hereniko’s first narrative feature film "Pear ta Ma ‘On Maf: The Land Has Eyes" had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and European premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Selected for competition at the Shanghai International Film Festival and screened at more than thirty other film festivals, it won "Best Dramatic Feature" at the Imaginative Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto, Canada. Fiji also nominated it as Best Foreign Language film to the Academy Awards in 2005. It also had a commercial theatre run, was selected for broadcasting nation-wide on PBS, and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Hereniko has also made short narrative films and documentaries and was a story and cultural consultant for Walt Disney’s animated film "Moana". Hereniko has written for the stage as well, most notably "The Last Virgin in Paradise", "The Monster", and "Moana: The Rising of the Sea". His films and stage productions have reached audiences in North America, Europe, Russia, Asia, and throughout Oceania, including Australia and New Zealand. His films and plays are studied in many schools, colleges, and universities in Oceania and beyond, and distributed throughout the world to universities and public libraries through Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company. Hereniko received the Ph.D. in Literature and Language from the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji and the M.Ed. from the University of Newcastle-upon Tyne in England. He has served as the Director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawaii as well as Director of the Oceania Center for Arts, Culture, and Pacific Studies at USP.
Phone: (808)7220575
Address: Academy for Creative Media, University of Hawaii, 2550 Campus Road, Crawford 204, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA.