Filmmaker Bios

Renee Tajima-PeñaRenee Tajima-Peña (Director/Producer) was nominated for an Academy Award for her documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? which opened the 1989 season of POV Her film My America...Or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997) , was an award-winner at the Sundance Film Festival. Her other directing credits include The Mexico Story for Kartemquin Films' collaborative series on immigration; The New Americans (IDA Award winner); Labor Women; The Last Beat Movie (Sundance Channel); and The Best Hotel on Skid Row (premiered at Cannes, aired on HBO).

Tajima-Peña has been awarded the Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, two Rockefeller Fellowships in Documentary Film, a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award and other honors. She began her filmmaking career at Third World Newsreel and Asian Cine-Vision in New York and has been a film critic for The Village Voice and cultural commentator for NPR. She is the graduate director of the masters program in social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Tajima-Peña lives in Los Angeles.

Evangeline GriegoEvangeline "Vangie" Griego (Producer) is an award-winning independent producer/director of the documentaries Paño Arte: Images From Inside and Border Visions/Visiones Fronterizo. She collaborated with Tajima-Peña on the multi-part series The New Americans and the special My Journey Home both for PBS. More recently, Griego co-produced the new documentary Chevolution (Red Envelope Entertainment/Netflix and Arte) and produced Sir! No Sir! (Sundance Channel). She is a co-founder of the Silver Lake Film Festival in Los Angeles. She serves on the board of directors for NALIP (the National Association of Latino Independent Producers) and the OUTFEST Los Angeles gay & lesbian film festival Outfest. She is currently in production on the feature documentary God Willing about a Bible-based nomadic cult. Griego lives in Los Angeles.