Vilsoni Hereniko

Vilsoni Hereniko (born 13 October 1954) is a Rotuman playwright, screenwriter, film director, academic, author, actor, poet, and master weaver. He is best known as the writer-director of The Land Has Eyes (Rotuman: Pear ta ma ʻon maf), the first feature film shot on Rotuma, and for a long academic career as a scholar of Pacific literature, theatre and film. Hereniko has served as director of Pacific studies centres, edited the academic journal The Contemporary Pacific, lectured widely, and in recent years has produced short films, documentaries, and scholarly essays that foreground Indigenous aesthetics and cultural practice.

He is a professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Hawaiʻi.