Lala Openi

Cultural Worker, Designer, and multi-hyphenated Artist Lala Openi creates designs, films, and spaces for the extended & multifaceted communities in which they live, work, love and grow, as a genderqueer (gnc), 5th-generation San Francisco Bay-bred “American Born Chinese” (ABC).

Openi’s work as a creative strategist is in shifting the dominant narrative by both conceiving of, as well as bringing visual and conceptual execution to projects that challenge our engrained perspectives in the ongoing conversation with both self and space.

Since 2012, Openi has brought visual clarity & intentional representation  in a contemporary digital-forward landscape through pixel-perfect execution and conscientious consideration in projects which holding space for underrepresented narratives in communities within their native Bay Area, and second home of O‘ahu.

While their past work has focused on collaborative & inclusive revisioning of contemporary representations of the joy & multiplicity of black & indigenous people of color (bipoc) as a direct counter to racial triangulation; their future work hopes to build on equal representation, justice and prosperity for all people of color including their fellow ABC’s within the larger currents tessellating and succeeding in the undoing of cultural and humanitarian erasure.

As a member of now-staple Bay Area tastemaking collectives Them Hellas and The House of Malico (formerly known as Malidoma Collective), Openi has fed fuel to Bay Area Gen-X creative culture with collaborative & individual installation & visual art, as well as documentation as founder of Veuxdo Child Films.

After relocating to O‘ahu for health reasons in 2016, Openi brought their experience in spacemaking to co-create INBTWNS, Hawai‘i's first QTIPOC-centered safe(r) space party of its kind, catalyzing a new chapter in O‘ahu's nightlife and creative scene. In 2017, Openi produced and curated "Also Here" - the first official gallery exhibition for Honolulu pride, which centered queer Kanaka Maoli alongside local qtipoc artists.

While Openi’s work with The Contingency and The House of Malico is featured in Lei Culture, The Eastbay Express, and SF Weekly, their work as a solo, contributing, and presenting artist has been shown at the Oakland Museum of California,  SOMArts, at Contact Hawai‘i 2018, and at the Honolulu Biennial 2019.

After creating & running Veuxdo Child Films from 2008-2015, Openi entered the film festival circuit as a director & lead actor of their short film “U” which made its debut at Honolulu International Film Festival 2017, with sequential selections at Hawaii Rainbow Film Festival 2018, and CAAMfest 37 in 2019.  

Openi continues to simultaneously serve as in-house freelance Design Consultant, Video Editor & Motion Graphics Artist to many Oakland Bay Area space-makers & culture-keepers including The Abstract, The House of Malico, EastSide Arts Alliance, World Trust Educational Services, Edutainment for Equity, and Sh8peshifter Inc.