| Sky Bruno | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Sky Bruno, often compared to Ken Leung | |
| Heritage | Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian), Filipino, Japanese, Chinese |
| Origin | Kāneʻohe, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi |
| Based in | New York Lenapehoking |
| Occupations | Filmmaker · photographer · media artist · producer |
| Years active | 2017–present |
| Education | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (BA) Windward Community College |
| Notable work | SHAPE Spotlight: Sean Yoro |
| Awards | Sundance Ignite Fellow (2018) |
| ITM Studios | |
  | |
| Studio | ITM Studios |
| Practice | A way of living and making (2024–) |
| Practice | Documentary film · photography · spatial and interactive installation · production · cultural guidance · community media education |
| Links | |
| Website | skybruno.com |
| Résumé | Download (PDF, 83 KB) |
| skybrunofilms@gmail.com | |
Sky Bruno is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian), Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese filmmaker, photographer, and media artist from Kāneʻohe on Oʻahu. Home is now New York, in Lenapehoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. His creative practice is a poetic inquiry into kuleana, the Hawaiian responsibility to people, culture, and land. It asks how film, photography, broadcast, and the archive can serve Indigenous self-determination and visual sovereignty. The practice also reaches toward the ethereal through spatial and interactive installation, a life lived by intuition, and the study of philosophy and ontology. Sky Bruno studied film photography at Windward Community College and received a BA in Digital Cinema & Creative Media from the Academy for Creative Media at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.[7]
ITM Studios began in 2024. Other work has taken place on the studio floors of Pier 59 and Spring Studios and in the community space Index by garden3d, as well as with Sundance Ignite and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.[1] The work ranges from the darkroom to live broadcast and real-time installation. It is made alongside nonprofits, small businesses, and young people so that each story stays with the people and places in it. The short documentary SHAPE and a 2018 Sundance Ignite Fellowship mark the beginning of this practice.[2]
Career
Index by garden3d
Studio Assistant, Events & Operations · Aug 2025 – present
Index is a creative coworking space run by the collective garden3d between Greenpoint and Chinatown. Sky Bruno manages its operations, from member intake and tours to the daily relationship with members and clients. The role also covers the evening and weekend program of talks, screenings, and member gatherings. Sound, light, the arrangement of the room, and the flow of guests are set in close work with outside organizers.[3]
ITM Studios
A way of living and making · Dec 2024 – present
Begun in 2024 as a way of living and making, ITM Studios took root in the still image and the moving image. Its practice has since grown into archival work, production, spatial and interactive installation, research, and cultural guidance. The studio serves artists, brands, institutions, and communities in New York and across Oceania. At its center is a community network of stylists, directors of photography, and collaborators through which the studio casts, produces, and delivers projects from first idea to final form. The studio also makes, repairs, and adapts its own tools and treats each problem on set as material for the work. Its cultural and scholarly guidance is rooted in Indigenous research methodologies. Institutions, productions, and collaborators come to ITM for advice on cultural protocol, representation, and relationship to place. Throughout this work the studio advocates for Native Hawaiian and Pasifika communities to keep authorship of their own stories.
Archival work is a large part of the studio and follows a Hawaiian way of thinking. I ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope: in the time before lies the time after. ITM gathers, scans, and keeps the photographs, film, sound, and stories its communities keep. Documentation here is an act of care and authorship. Each record is kept with the consent of the people in it so that its ʻike can return to the lāhui. Some stories stay with the families they belong to. Together the records chart Hawaiian and Indigenous futures as they are being made. The Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon names this lineage Indigenous Futurisms.
At the crux of ITM is the forming of a language. Repeated over time, a gesture becomes a symbol and the symbol becomes a language. The studio places itself at the start of that process with the babble of an infant learning to speak. Consistent challenges and a steady raising of the work refine each attempt until a clear voice grows out of the repetition. Sky Bruno also serves as Ambassador Photographer for Spring Place and develops personal projects such as Spring Bloom.
Court Date is a tennis apparel line and racket club and the first brand from the studio Slow Rodeo. Behind-the-scenes coverage of its first editorial was shot under Slow Rodeo co-founder and creative director Ryan Hamilton. ITM is now conceptualizing spatial activations for the brand's future events. The same work is underway for Tarform. Taras Kravtchouk founded the company in Brooklyn to build electric motorcycles.
In 2021 Sky Bruno worked on a Matador Network series devoted to mālama, the Hawaiian practice of care. Its three films turn to the sea in Mālama Kai, the land in Mālama ʻĀina, and one's people in Mālama Ka Poʻe.[4]
Fashion studios
Sky Bruno has worked as a studio assistant at Spring Studios since 2024. Large fashion and editorial productions run on its floor among talent, clients, and crew. The job covers freight, lighting grids, and equipment prep along with training new hires across shifts.[5]
Studio education began in 2023 in the locations department at Pier 59 Studios. That job involved heavy equipment, loads, deliveries, builds, and strikes. The digital department came next, with camera systems to build and update and rentals to coordinate until 2024.[6]
Teaching and community media
| Years | Organization | Role | Work |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022–2023 | Waipahu High School | Audio Engineering Teacher | Designed and taught a project-based curriculum in audio and storytelling and led media projects across departments |
| 2020 | Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center | Educator, Our Stories | Taught young Hawaiians to record oral histories with kūpuna through sound recording, interviews, photography, and film, including a week on Maunakea in January 2020[10] |
| 2017–2021 | ʻŌlelo Community Media (AmeriCorps) | Media Mentor | Taught camera, editing, and field production and produced projects led by the community |
Film and recognition
Sky Bruno's short documentary SHAPE (2017) follows the brothers Wade and Kerry Tokoro. Both shape surfboards on Oʻahu, where Wade runs the label Tokoro Surfboards. The film was an official selection of the 2017 Honolulu Surf Film Festival and the 2017 ʻOhina Short Film Showcase.[2] The artist then directed, filmed, and edited Spotlight: Sean Yoro, a portrait of the muralist HULA. In 2018 the Sundance Ignite Fellowship named Sky Bruno one of fifteen fellows under the mentorship of the filmmaker Malik Vitthal. An essay for the Sundance Institute reflects on the fellowship and on a month spent at the Sundance Institute Directors Lab.[7]
On Oʻahu the early work found a home in the ʻOhina Short Film Showcase under the care of its executive director Gerard Elmore. Sky Bruno was casting director for the ʻOhina short Mauka to Makai (2018). Elmore also opened creative partnerships that reached Hawaiian Airlines in-flight entertainment, the Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club, and FLUX Hawaii. Pacific Islanders in Communications brings Pasifika stories to public television on PBS and supports their festival runs across Oceania.
Beth de Araújo's Josephine came out of the Sundance labs that year and won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance in 2026. Eimi Imanishi's Nomad Shadow premiered a year earlier at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sundance also premiered The Huntress, the first feature by Suzanne Andrews Correa, in 2026.
- Sundance Ignite Fellow, Sundance Institute (2018)
- Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna (2019), master class with Jane Campion, then developing The Power of the Dog
- Best Director Award, UH Mānoa
- ACM Senior Leadership Award, UH Mānoa
- Gold, Promotional Brand Video, NCMPR Paragon Awards[8]
Watch
SHAPE (2017) is available on request.
Mentors and collaborators
Sky Bruno trained in film photography under Mark Hamasaki at Windward Community College. There the darkroom first taught patience as a method. Malik Vitthal guided the Sundance Ignite year. In 2019 Jane Campion led the Il Cinema Ritrovato master class in Bologna.
The Rotuman filmmaker and playwright Vilsoni Hereniko taught Indigenous filmmaking at the University of Hawaiʻi. Playwriting and theatre arrived through Kumu Tammy Hailiʻōpua Baker and her hana keaka, Hawaiian-language theatre. Uncle Calvin Hoe brings the knowledge of the ahupuaʻa at Hakipuʻu into the practice through its instruments and its people.
Collaborators across the analog community of Hawaiʻi include the photographers Chris Rohrer, John Hook, Lenny Kaholo, and Kenyatta Kelechi. The circle extends through Treehouse, Analog Sunshine Recorders, and Tokoro Surfboards.
Approach
His hopes for all of us was to fail. To learn and try. To leave all inhibitions on the mountain and challenge ourselves. He wanted us to understand that the lab didn’t thrive on comfort but in the willingness to adapt and revise.
Sky Bruno's practice questions the conventions through which stories are made and kept in the documentary, the photograph, the broadcast, and the archive. Films, scans, broadcasts, and installations accumulate into one body of work. It acts as a collection and a map that traces madness, love, despair, and the human condition as they move through a life. The method is slow and grounded in research. That research draws on archives and a personal library as much as on time spent listening to people and place.
In the darkroom film is shot and developed by hand. The scanner works another way because objects go straight onto the glass with no lens between them and the record. From there sound and image run live through hardware and software. By treating every result as a study, the artist invites viewers to consider how a life is recorded and how it changes in the retelling. Ontology is the next field of study. For now the research is life itself in New York. The notebooks carry screenplay imaginings, ad scribbles, and type studies such as N.A.P.
Systems and pipelines
Colonial logic lives in aesthetics, workflows, and archives and in the frame itself. Production at ITM Studios is built to find it there through four stages. The first stage sorts raw footage, images, and research for what carries meaning. Organization follows and gives each piece a place within a structured archive. From that archive a method takes shape as a pipeline that carries material toward the edit with a person signing off at every stage. The last stage returns the work to the public as a shared resource through films, broadcasts, and open libraries such as the bookshelf on this page.
Ciel0 Radio is an independent station housed in a Pelican case as a portable cyberdeck. Interactive spatial works, visual assets, and digital artifacts are in development in TouchDesigner along with a photo and video installation on Mauna Kea. Current research draws on the free tools that the United States Geological Survey offers to the public. Its volcano cameras and seismic records are studied for their patterns and their audio waves, gathering material toward a future project whose language is still unsettled.
Visual sovereignty
Kuleana grounds Sky Bruno's work as a storyteller. That kuleana comes through genealogy. Visual sovereignty names what the work asks of the image. Native people represent themselves on their own terms. Their ways of knowing, their ongoing struggles, and their ancestral ties to ʻāina and to named places such as Mauna Kea all enter the frame. Stories of Hawaiʻi and Oceania move through the practice in film, mentorship, cultural advising, and teaching. That work runs through the Matador Network mālama films, mentorship at ʻŌlelo Community Media, teaching at Waipahu High School. The Our Stories oral history program of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center records kūpuna in their own voices as groundwork for future ways of storytelling.
The work continues on the windward side of Oʻahu, in the years between school, film sets, jobs, and family life. Much of it is with young people of many backgrounds. At Hakipuʻu Learning Center and at Kapunahala Elementary in Kāneʻohe that has meant working with youth at risk. Hakipuʻu is a Hawaiian-focused public charter school that teaches through the land and waters of its ahupuaʻa. The camera becomes a way for these students to look at their own place and to tell its story in their own words.
The seal descends from the royal arms of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, which the College of Arms in London designed in 1842. Kamehameha I stands at left in his cloak and mahiole. Liberty stands at right with Ka Hae Hawaiʻi. A phoenix rises from eight taro leaves for the eight main islands. The motto Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono was spoken by Kamehameha III in 1843 when the kingdom's sovereignty was restored. It is often translated as "the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness." The year 1959 marks statehood.
Research runs through Hawaiian Studies and through ʻUluʻulu, the moving image archive of Hawaiʻi. Its decades of film and videotape carry the images that Hawaiians and outsiders made of the islands. Read closely and essayistically, these collections show who stood behind the camera and who kept the record. The images then go back to the families and places they came from. Each film is made as a form of care for the people in it and for the ancestors behind them.
Haoles Get All the Girls is currently in post-production. Its development was funded by Pacific Islanders in Communications during the tenure of executive director Leanne Kaʻiulani Ferrer.
In New York the partners include the Pacific Island Film Festival of New York City and with Hālāwai. Work with Talk Story Collective runs under the guidance of Wainani Paikai. For Hālāwai Sky Bruno also designed and built a new website that gathers its programs, film festival, board, and flood relief in one place.
Sacred things are slow. The studio keeps this as a working rule, taking on a few projects each year and giving each the time it requires.
Practice and tools
Production is organized in StudioBinder, Scenechronize, SyncOnSet, BlueCircle, QTake, Airtable, and Notion. Capture and post take place in Capture One, Frame.io, Final Cut Pro 12, and DaVinci Resolve. Adobe Creative Cloud completes the suite, with Premiere and After Effects for editing and motion. Image and design work moves through Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, where the design takes its final form.
Audio engineering runs through Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, and DaVinci Resolve. Sky Bruno taught the craft at Waipahu High School as its audio engineering teacher.
Installations built in TouchDesigner respond in real time to the room around them. Three-dimensional work is built in Blender. Liquidsoap and Icecast carry the broadcasts out of the studio and onto the air. Hardware is an ongoing study in which Raspberry Pi boards and Linux run the builds and HTML and Python bind them together. A large collection of nostalgic media players and devices feeds the experiments.
Education
Sky Bruno studied at Windward Community College from 2014 to 2017 before entering the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa's Academy for Creative Media. The BA in Digital Cinema & Creative Media came in December 2020, after three years on the Dean's List.[7]
At the Academy Lisette Marie Flanary shaped the documentary work. Her films follow hula from Hawaiʻi to California and Tokyo. Sky Bruno worked as post-production assistant on her Tokyo Hula (2020). Vilsoni Hereniko taught Indigenous filmmaking in the same years that Joel Moffett led the screenwriting courses.
Care and kinship
Sky Bruno is born with the congenital heart defect pulmonary atresia and has undergone several open-heart surgeries. The condition is rare. Roughly 416 babies a year are born with it in the United States, about 1 in 8,333 births.[9] Treatment brought the family to the West Coast. It became a second home and an early creative landing.
HUGS, Make-A-Wish Hawaii, and Ronald McDonald House supported the family during those years. The community work grows directly from that care.
- Camp Taylor: mentor to young people with congenital heart defects
- HUGS: volunteer with Hawaiʻi's seriously ill children and their families
- Advocate for access in the creative industries
Personal collection
Work in progress includes logo sketches for a new bakery drawn in Procreate. The first studies for its mark sit beside them.
Tools | Musings | Experiments
Real-time studies
Built in TouchDesigner in 2026, these real-time studies translate light, depth, and body heat into image.
Research
Interference Archive in Brooklyn keeps flyers, zines, and press notices from free and pirate radio stations. Sky Bruno studied this material while building Ciel0 Radio.
Items courtesy of Interference Archive · @interferencearchive
Resources
Further reading: Writings, Sky Bruno's channel on Are.na
The Are.na channel Writings functions as a working library of books, essays, manuals, zines, and syllabi on design, film, theory, and the land. The 700 free PDFs below are drawn directly from it, and any one can be taken from the shelf and read.
Pinned first is the Hawaiian & Indigenous Studies shelf: the Kumulipo in Queen Liliʻuokalani's 1897 translation and Martha Warren Beckwith's 1951 edition, both free, then Mary Kawena Pukui's ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, which Bishop Museum Press keeps in print, Lynn Cook's illustrated journal of Hawaiian petroglyphs, Nā Kiʻi Pōhaku, and Decolonising the Digital, a free 2018 collection of essays and interviews on technology as cultural practice, made with the Aboriginal-owned consultancy Old Ways, New. Files are hosted on Are.na. Paul Auster's books sit on the Fiction and Essays & Writing shelves and open in the New York Public Library's Libby app, free to borrow with a library card. Rights stay with their authors and publishers. Spine colors come from Sanzo Wada's A Dictionary of Color Combinations.
Sites of inspiration
- Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi Island · 19°49′14″N 155°28′05″W
- Are.na
- ʻUluʻulu, the moving image archive of Hawaiʻi
- Kanopy
- Internet Archive
- JSTOR
- UH Mānoa Library
- Kāneʻohe Public Library
- Brooklyn Public Library
- New York Public Library
- Culture Pass
References
- ^Bruno, Sky. Sky Bruno, Producer & Photographer. 2026.
- ^"Sky Bruno." Sundance Collab.
- ^garden3d. Index, Greenpoint/Chinatown, New York.
- ^Matador Network. Mālama series.
- ^Spring Studios, New York.
- ^Pier 59 Studios, Chelsea Piers, New York.
- ^"Sky Bruno Named Sundance Ignite Fellow for 2018." Academy for Creative Media System (archived copy; the original page is offline); "Writer/Director Sky Bruno on His Experience at the Sundance Institute Directors Lab." sundance.org.
- ^National Council for Marketing & Public Relations.
- ^"About Pulmonary Atresia." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- ^Wu, Katherine J. "In Hawaiʻi, Young Storytellers Document the Lives of Their Elders." Smithsonian Magazine, 28 May 2020.
External links
- Résumé (PDF, 83 KB)
- Portfolio on Are.na
- Sky Bruno on IMDb
- Sky Bruno on LinkedIn
- skybrunofilms@gmail.com
- Kākoʻo: support Native Hawaiian artists (Zelle)
- Index: website · Instagram
- garden3d: website · Substack
- Spring Studios · Pier 59 Studios
- Sky Bruno on the Sundance Institute Directors Lab (sundance.org, 2018)
