Reiko Tahara Programmer & Co-Founder @ Uno Port Art Films, Educator, Translator

Reiko is an immigrant from Tokyo living in the United States. She teaches, programs, translates, organizes, and helps run a community garden in Brooklyn, NY. Active in production until the 2000s, she has directed or co-directed experimental documentary films that have been widely shown in the U.S. and internationally. She has received grants and fellowships from the US National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Japanese government, the Mellon Foundation, the Yamagata International Film Festival (2023, writing fellow), and the Flaherty Seminar (2025, curatorial fellow).

In 2010, she co-founded Uno Port Art Films (Okayama, Japan) with her husband Max Uesugi, and continues to serve as its chief programmer. The DIY festival focuses on independent films under the banner of “Life, Art, Film,” highlighting the creators from underrepresented communities worldwide. She has been teaching at Hunter College (City Univ. of NY), NYU, and Downtown Community Television (Chinatown, NY) for the past 15 years, offering courses on topics such as documentary history and theory, Latin American resistance cinema, Asian and Asian-American cinema, and Asian history and culture.