KANANI KOSTER

Director // writer

Outpacing passive notions of “exploration,” Kanaka Maoli writer and director Kanani Koster confronts her subjects head-on. Committed to unveiling the raw realities of so-called “ordinary” life, she crafts stories that are as authentic as they are hilarious. She is a ‘24 American Film Institute Directing alum, 2024 ‘Ohina Lab Fellow and ‘23 Punky Aloha Scholar for Kanaka 'Ōiwi and Pasifika Creatives. She has spoken on numerous panels on race, diversity and representation in film as well as serving as a judge for the 2022 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Kanani is the 2020 Oregon Made Film Grant winner for the docu-short, Any Oregon Sunday, and a 2020 Portland Arts Museum Re:Imagined Artist recipient. Her short film No Spectators Allowed, has won and been nominated for awards such as the Best of the PNW Short Film at the 2022 Bend Film Festival and included in the The Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian’s Fall 2023 showcase. Her AFI thesis film, FCBK, was funded by Sloan and Visionary Justice Story Lab playing at AFI FEST and Hawai’i International Film Festival. In 2024, Kanani’s current feature in development SHOOTS was a finalist for Tribeca AT&T’s Untold Story grant.

She has worked in the marketing and outreach department for both Seattle International Film Festival and the Northwest Film Center. Kanani was the Doculab Impact Lab Coordinator for A-Doc and Haverford in 2022. As the Acquisitions & Impact Manager for Collective Eye she has implemented campaigns for Personhood: Policing Pregnant Women in America, Food for the Rest of Us and other catalogue films focusing on community driven social change and partnerships with notable organizations like ACLU, Planned Parenthood and NAPW. She has programmed three shorts collections for Collective Eye: To Us the Ashes: Indigenous Shorts, Breaking the Model: Stories of Asian American History and Presence and Fractal: Stories Across the Gender Spectrum.