Associate Professor Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio

I am a Kanaka Maoli wahine mākua, artist, activist, scholar, and storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley to my parents, Jonathan and Mary Osorio. I earned my PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where I currently work as an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics. In 2020, my poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way We Rise, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021. In 2022, I was a lead artist and co-writer of the VR documentary On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World), which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and won the XR Experience Jury Award at SXSW 2022.

I am a proud former Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Postdoctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha Schools, Stanford University (BA), and New York University (MA). I am also the author of the award-winning book Remembering Our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea, published in 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. I believe in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.