Claudia Katayanagi is a documentary filmmaker and an alumni of UC Berkeley. As a Yonsei, a fourth generation Japanese American, and a descendant of American concentration camps during World War II, her work explores the complex, and cumulative effects of multiple forms of discrimination, such as racism, sexism and the American immigration policy and how these issues persist today.

Her debut feature documentary, A Bitter Legacy, explores the history of the imprisonment of over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry during WWII with a focus on the lesser-known, almost secret prisons for those who spoke up about the unlawfulness of these prisons, and were then labeled troublemakers and sent to “Citizen Isolation Centers” in Arizona, Utah and California. These camps are now considered to be precursors to the contentious U.S. military prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A Bitter Legacy is an award-winning documentary, and not only has played in film festivals worldwide, but has a distributor, Gravitas Ventures, and is now available on 8 different streaming platforms and is available on DVD and Blu-Ray at the Japanese American National Museum in LA and at the National Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco.

One of the first women, not to mention Asian American women to be in the IATSE Filmmakers Union, Claudia is an accomplished activist, trailblazer for minority women’s rights, and an industry veteran of more than 30 years.