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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
