Tiare Ribeaux (she/they/ʻo ia) is a Kanaka Maoli filmmaker, artist and creative producer based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Her work takes a decolonial approach to storytelling by employing non-linear narratives akin to our elemental cycles to tell stories around transformation and healing, centering how our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. She integrates magical realism into her films, and lets a story unfold across multiple characters and elemental forces. She uses components of speculative fiction and fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of land reclamation + restoration, healing, queerness, and belonging. Outside of film festivals, she has shown her work at galleries and museums in multi-channel, immersive installations, live cinematic performances, and augmented reality formats.
She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the NDN Radical Imagination Grant, the Native Lab Fellowship and Indigenous Film Fund from Sundance, the 4th World Media Fellowship, Cousin Collective Fellowship, two New and Experimental Works Grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. She has given guest lectures at conferences and universities including a keynote at ISEA Brisbane in 2024.
She founded B4BEL4B Gallery in Oakland in 2014 as a platform and community space to prioritize underrepresented + queer artists in media arts, where she served as Artistic Director for 8 years. She has curated and produced various media arts and performance festivals including the Soundwave Biennial and the Codame Festival, and co-founded Refresh Art + Technology as a collaborative and politically engaged platform for art, science and technology in 2016. She taught international multimedia arts workshops in Kyiv, Ukraine (2018) as part of the American Arts Incubator and Dunedin, Aotearoa, New Zealand (2023) as part of Leonardo’s Cultural Impact Lab and teaches Experimental + Indigenous Filmmaking at the School of Cinematic Arts at UH Manoa as a guest lecuturer.
She has screened her films at museums such as the MoMA, the National Gallery, the Hammer Museum, BAMPFA, the de Young Museum, the Asian Film Archive; as well as at various film festivals including BlackStar, NewFest, Frameline, HIFF and others.
email: tiareribeaux@gmail.com
From a prompt from Cousin Collective Cycle 3 “How does your work respond to your own understanding of Indigeneity”:
My own understanding of Indigeneity in the modern sense is one of shapeshifting, adaptation, resilience, honoring the past, present and future all at the same time, bringing our ancestors with us our the journey of understanding ourselves, forgetting and remembering our cultural practices and stories, hearing the literal wind telling you things pretty often, spam musubi as “native food” and chili from Zippy’s as comfort food, crying on a paved street for the water that once flowed underneath it, feeling nauseous and physical pain at “Pearl Harbor”, crying for the poisoned waters at Pu‘uloa, saying Pu‘uloa instead of Pearl Harbor, visiting ruins as ceremony, feeling conflicted around whether or not you should tell your friends (not from Hawai’i) not to visit the islands, gathering with other Hawaiians outside of Iolani Palace where our queen was once imprisoned and signing songs in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i on fourth of July as a form of defiance, hearing “Ku'u Pua i Paoakalani” by George Helm and crying without even knowing what all the words mean, growing up having to memorize “Hawai‘i Aloha” in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i written by a Missionary but still crying for adoration and nostalgia of the song while singing it as an adult, crying for the mall that your teenage self frequented that got bulldozed for condos, reminiscing about the raves in warehouses next to sugarcane fields, seeing wa‘a in the clouds, seeing literally everything in the clouds, recalling having to work at Rainbow Drive-In as a teenager everytime you go there with friends, working as a tourist photographer as a teenager while hating tourism but proud of the fact that you still used rolls of film instead of a digital camera, watching the moonrise and knowing what the name of moon is in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and how my ancestors practiced certain things on those nights and honoring those, also forgetting those practices and the pain of colonization by going to raves under the moon, catharsis found in the form of crowd surfing and mosh pits, dancing at the club as ceremony, healing through singing karaoke, healing through kanikapila, finding new ceremonies, writing new stories, bridging, expanding and building upon the 1000s of years of our mo‘olelo. At least that’s where I’m at with it right now - my understanding of Indigeneity is a constantly evolving thing as is my practice.
