reiko ho
recent projects.
upcoming projects.
• August 2024: Lovey Lee (Kumu Kahua Theatre) -Director
• September 2024: The Great Race (HTY)- 2024 NEA Grant Recipient, Playwright/Director
• January 2025: Musubi Man (HTY) - Director
• March 2025: Too Many Mangos (HTY) - World Premiere, Director
• May 2025: Kimʻs Convenience (MVT)- Hawaiʻi Premiere, Director
about.
Reiko Ho is an accomplished director and multi-disciplinary theatre maker from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, who loves telling stories that reflect the diverse voices of her island home. Her work has been seen throughout Hawaiʻi as well as nationally.
Last season, her show "The Carp Who Would Not Quit," that she wrote and directed for Honolulu Theatre For Youth, completed a statewide tour of Hawai'i, then toured to 14 venues across the country and closed it's run as part of the season at the acclaimed Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Also, last season, she traveled to Florida to direct "Cry It Out" for The Studio Theatre Tierra Del Sol. Reiko finished the 2023-24 season with the world premiere of her latest work, "The Great Race: The Story of the Chinese Zodiac" which she wrote and directed for Honolulu Theatre For Youth (HTY). "The Great Race" was a 2024 recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Reiko is currently Artistic Associate for Honolulu Theatre for Youth, a member of The Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA), and on the Board of Directors for TYA/USA, the leading national organization for professionals in the field of Theatre for Young Audiences.
aloha
My name is Reiko.
Iʻm a theater maker, a mom, a martial arts sensei, and slightly obsessed with Japanese milk bread recipes. Mostly, Iʻm just a human who loves to make sense of the world by telling stories through my Hawaiʻi born, multi-ethnic lens.
My great grandparents on both the Japanese and Chinese sides of my family arrived in Hawaiʻi in the early 1900s to work on the sugar cane plantations along side Hawaiian, Filipino, Korean, and Portuguese laborers.
I identify as Japanese and Chinese and am very proud of my Asian heritage. I love creating theater that reflects the diverse voices of my 'ohana and the community in Hawaiʻi. I love Pidgin, the language that developed as a method of communication on the plantations, and I love to see representation of these voices and faces onstage and on my production teams.
I believe theatre should reveal, should embrace, should be the start of important conversations.
I grapple with generational, systemic trauma and the constant code switching which is part of daily life. Lately, Iʻve been reflecting on how we sometimes erase ourselves, and I think about what it means to be considered “other.” I am not “Hawaiian.” I am not Japanese from Japan. I am not Chinese from China. I am never considered "White" although there is a little French in the mix on my Chinese side. When I am on the Continent, the mainland US, I am asked where I am “really from.”
Growing up in Hawaiʻi has taught me to focus on what is in my heart-- my heart that is all of these things. I live in the space between many places and cultures.
It is from this space that I make theater.
