Assistant Professor
Merata Mita is an accomplished filmmaker, lecturer and essayist, who has been involved in all aspects of filmmaking for more than 25 years. Born and reared in New Zealand, Mita was the first woman in the country to write and direct a dramatic feature film, MAURI, (1988), after a lengthy career as a documentary filmmaker. Highly sought after for her expertise and knowledge, Mita has hosted workshops and been featured on panels ranging from theSundance Film Festival's "From Oral Tradition to the Screen: Indigenous Screenwriting"; to "A Conversation with Merata Mita" at the Messagesticks Festival held at the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia. She was a panelist at the Raising Voices Conference, hosted by the Hubert Bals Fund Conference in Rotterdam, exploring training programs that will stimulate the next generation of culturally distinctive and authentic film making voices.
Mita is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Creative Media, UH Manoa, where she teaches courses in indigenous screenwriting, aesthetics and production. She is proud to represent the Academy for Creative Media (ACM) on a number of boards and labs that she participates in at an international level.
She currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the National Geographic's All Roads Film Project, which supports indigenous and minority culture filmmakers from around the globe. She is a patron of the ImageNative Film Festival in Canada; and serves on the Board of Advisors of the Sundance Institute's Native Program. In 2003 and 2004, Mita was the artistic director/ creative advisor, to the Sundance/Moonstone screenwriters labs, held in New Zealand. Most recently, Mita served as a Creative Advisor to the Australian Film Commission's inaugural screenwriters lab for Aboriginal Australian writer/ directors, The Long Black Writers Lab, 2005. And since 2002 has served as artistic director of the Native American Filmmakers Workshop held during Sundance Film Festival. In 2005 Mita organised the inaugural Native Hawaiian Film Festival, The Hawaiinuiakea Film Festival, in conjunction with the UH Department of Hawaiian Studies and the Department of Hawaiian Language.
In 2003 Mita was honored with a retrospective of her work at the First Peoples Festival in Montreal, Quebec. The retrospective included such films as BASTION POINT: DAY 507 (1980); PATU! (1983); MAURI (1988); MANA WAKA (1990), DREAD (1996); HOTERE (2002) taken from the body of more than 30 films she has been involved with in her career. In 2005 the First Nations First Features Program, featured her film MAURI at the Museum Of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.
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