Peter Rockford Espiritu (Tau) is the Executive and Artistic Director of Tau Dance Theater, the
only professional dance company founded by a Native Hawaiian. Based in Honolulu and founded in 1996, Tau Dance Theater creates safe and imaginative spaces for “Brown Dance” to thrive.
In 2025, Tau served as co-choreographer for Disney’s Tale of Moana aboard the Disney Treasure. He is a 2024 Western Arts Alliance Performing Arts Discovery (PAD) Fellow, a 2024 WESTAF BIPOC Artist Fund recipient, a 2023 Dance/USA Fellow, a 2022 Western Arts Alliance Advancing Indigenous Performance Native Launchpad Fellow, and a 2021 Banff Intercultural Indigenous Choreographers Creation Lab scholarship recipient in Canada. Tau is a seven-time recipient of the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Choreographic
Award. His newest work, Waihona Kino (Body Archive), received a 2025 Pillow Lab residency at Jacob’s Pillow and a 2026 Production Residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Tau artistic leadership roles, including Artistic Director for the Western Arts Alliance Indigenous Roadshow residency in Homer, Alaska, in 2019; Artistic Director of the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture & Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji from 2011 to 2017, a center founded by Professor Epeli Hau‘ofa; and Artistic Director of ECHO (Education for Cultural and Historical Organizations) from 2004 to 2011. In 2011, he also co-choreographed the Starlit Hui Show at Disney’s Aulani Resort.
He has served on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, The Irvine Foundation, Dance/USA, Hawaii State Foundation for Culture and the Arts and for more than a decade served as a Commissioner for Culture and the Arts representing dance for the City and County of Honolulu across four mayoral administrations.
Mr. Espiritu has spent more than 35 years directing, choreographing, and teaching internationally
as a master teacher, with recent work in dramaturgy for the premiere and world tour of MINOWIN in Canada with the Vancouver-based Indigenous company Dancers of
Damelahamid. Evening-length works include Hanau Ka Moku: An Island Is Born (2002), Naupaka: A Hawaiian Opera (2006), Poliahu: Goddess of Mauna Kea (2009),
and Moana: The Rising of the Sea (2015), which toured Norway, Scotland, Copenhagen, and Brussels, including a presentation for the European Parliament.
