2016 Writers Immersive Participants
Courtney Takayabashi 
Courtney Takabayashi is a writer and educator from Kāne‘ohe, Hawai‘i who consumes delectable food and pop culture in mass quantities. She taught English in Japan, worked at a local museum and wrote for the Governor of Hawai‘i before becoming a faculty member at a community college. Courtney enjoys writing scripts, short stories, novels, and blog posts.
Doris Yeung
Doris Yeung is a Chinese American filmmaker and film curator born in San Francisco, and raised in Hong Kong, SAR and California. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, American Film Institute and the Beijing Film Academy and has been based in Beijing and Amsterdam, The Netherlands for the last 14 years. She has completed 2 feature films Motherland (2009) and Taxi Stories (2016) and is the founder and former director of CinemAsia Film Festival Netherlands, one of the largest Asian film festivals in Europe for the past 14 years.
Katherine Clark
Katherine Elisabeth Clark is a writer-director whose storytelling often touches on gender, representation, and the boundaries between myth and reality. After completing her MFA, she moved to the east coast and co-founded PopUp Anthology, an organization dedicated to the voices of local, independent filmmakers. She frequently visits Honolulu for work on her feature, Pololia.
Mark Geiger
A criminal defense attorney for over 30 years representing a variety of defendants who have been charged with crimes ranging from shoplifting to murder; won several post conviction murder cases, including a triple murder. He began his writing career in 2000, having written and published two novels, ten screenplays.
Rex Moribe
Born and Raised on the Island of Kauai, Rex Moribe has built a diverse career – from being a professional bodyboarder, IT engineer, entrepreneur, to now a film maker/screenwriter. His most recent endeavor is an documentary feature titled Dear Thalia which follows a homeless family living in Kakaako, Hawaii. It premiered at the 2015 Hawaii International Film Festival.
Rich Figel
Rich Figel was a newspaper reporter in New York, before switching careers and becoming a marketing executive. He moved to Hawaii and and became a commodity options broker. He has written humor columns for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and currently produces a monthly half-hour TV show about entrepreneurs and local businesses in Hawaii called Career Changers, which airs daily on Oceanic Time Warner Cable.
Sara Israel 
An award-winning playwright and theater director, Sara’s work has been seen around the country—productions that have allowed her to collaborate with an amazing range of talented artists, ages 11 to 85, including Spirit Award winners, television icons, and the finest classically trained actors. For camera, Sara’s script Triumvirate was named Best Un-produced Pilot by Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America, West. The Happiest Person In America, a short film she wrote and directed, is on the festival and event circuit.
Ta’Ltosh
As writer, director, cinematographer based in Honolulu, Hawaii, he worked in various positions on film sets from assistant cameraman, to director of photography, to director for small and large projects. He has written, directed and produced several narrative and documentary short films, a feature documentary, and wrote three feature screenplays.
Victoria Moy 
Victoria Moy graduated with a MFA in Dramatic Writing (Playwriting/ TV writing/ Screenwriting) at University of Southern California. She is the Arts Review columnist for Alhambra Source, a cowriter of the virtual reality game experience Animal Kingdom with Brazilian artist Frederico De Sa Fernandez, a writer for the new web series Shoe Me directed by Nic Weinfeld, and a participant of The Antaeus Playwrights Lab. Her play Gambled Eggs, had two readings in May 2015 in the Greenhouse at the Hothouse development program at the Pasadena Playhouse. Her plays have been produced around the country. Her book, Fighting for the Dream: Voices of Chinese American Veterans from WWII to Afghanistan was published in November 2014. It was #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in Asian Studies.