Tali Ariav is a Playwright, Translator, Teacher and a Performance Artist. She recently relocated to Honolulu after living for nearly six years on the Pacific island of Guam. Tali is currently an Adjunct Professor at Hawaii Pacific University. She earned two Masters of Fine Arts degrees in Literary Translation and in Playwriting from the Playwriting Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Born and raised in Israel; Tali speaks, writes and reads English, Hebrew, Arabic and Portuguese. Tali was one of the founding members of Orto-Da, an award-winning Israeli street theater group. Their 1999 performance of “Meta-Rabin,” an original, collaboratively written and performed street theater work, won First Prize at the Akko Theatre Festival in Israel, followed by earning First Prize for Street Theatre at the Chalôn dans la Rue Festival in Chalôn, France.

In early 2016, Tali spent four months in NYC teaching and collaboratively working on her playwriting at Fordham University and ESPA. Later in the year she co-chaired the Guam theater delegation for the 2016 Festival of the Pacific Arts, which was hosted in Guam and featured 3,500 artists from 24 different countries. Tali has acted as a guest host for several sessions of a Guam-based political radio show, Beyond the Fence. Her guest sessions focused on local artistic issues in Guam. She has specific interests in advancing political theater and the voice of the indigenous playwright–in Tali’s case, the voices of maturing playwrights in Hawai`i, Polynesia, and the Western Pacific Islands.