Native Hawai­ian vision­ary Kēhau Noe is an artist and sto­ry­teller. Her media is com­put­ers, and her mis­sion is to design pro­grams that help peo­ple to inter­act with and learn from the envi­ron­ment. “The chal­lenge of build­ing soft­ware or games that take advan­tage of what tech­nol­o­gy affords us, but still be acces­si­ble and use­ful to the gen­er­al per­son is fun to me, she says. “Soft­ware can be capa­ble of per­form­ing com­plex and seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble tasks, but if the aver­age per­son does not like to look at it, or can’t under­stand how to inter­face it, then not many peo­ple will use it. Her inno­v­a­tive sto­ry­telling immers­es view­ers in the Native Hawai­ian world view. We are pleased to fea­ture this trail­blaz­er on our blog today.

Cia­ra Leinaʻala Lacy is a tal­ent­ed writer-pro­duc­er-direc­tor whose pas­sion is telling sto­ries influ­enced by her Native Hawai­ian her­itage. Her doc­u­men­tary-style con­tent have shown at Sun­dance and Berli­nale and on stream­ing plat­forms includ­ing Net­flix, PBS, ABC, and Al Jazeera. Her award-win­ning fil­mog­ra­phy includes Is That Black Enough for You? (2022), This is the Way We Rise (2021), Out of State (2018), We are Still Here (2018), and 11/8/16 (2017), and as well as oth­er com­mer­cial projects. And as if all of that was­n’t impres­sive enough, Cia­ra is hum­ble and gra­cious. She recent­ly carved out some time out of her busy sched­ule to talk sto­ry with us.