Profile

Born in Philadelphia in 1973, Greg Dvorak spent his early childhood living in the American community in the U.S. missile-testing range at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where his father was a civilian engineer working for a defense contractor. His family returned to the United States when he was ten, and he lived in New Jersey through high school. At the age of 17, Greg first went to Japan as an exchange student, where he lived in Kobayashi, Miyazaki Prefecture and began his formal study of Japanese. After graduating with a BA with highest honors in East Asian Studies in 1996 from Rutgers University (prior to which he also attended Waseda University on a Monbusho Scholarship and studied Japanese literature at Princeton University), Greg returned to Japan to work as a Coordinator for International Relations in Nango, Miyazaki Prefecture for three years, which eventually led to his working for the 2000 G-8 Summit held in Kyushu and Okinawa. As a part of this position he welcomed the delegation from the Republic of the Marshall Islands at the 2nd Japan-South Pacific Forum Summit (PALM 2000), which resulted in his reconnecting and returning finally to his childhood home later that year, for the first time in twenty years. With a renewed interest in confronting and helping to deal with the contradictory consequences of both American and Japanese involvement in the Marshall Islands and Oceania at large, Greg decided to begin graduate studies and devote himself fully to learning about the history of Marshall Islanders in relation to these two superpowers. After working at an advertising firm in Tokyo for two years, in 2002, he was awarded an East-West Center Fellowship to pursue his MA at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He earned his degree with a certificate in International Cultural Studies (critical postmodern theory) in 2004. His MA thesis, “Remapping Home: Touring the Betweenness of Kwajalein” won the 2004 Norman Meller Award for outstanding graduate scholarly research and writing about the Pacific Islands region. It was accepted for publication in 2007. As a part of this project, he made his three first short films and became aware of his interest in filmmaking. He was then accepted to the Australian National University, where he received an International Postgraduate Scholarship to pursue his Cross-Cultural Research PhD (history/anthropology/political science) in dual affiliation with the Gender Relations Centre of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies and the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Research School of Humanities. His PhD thesis project, “Seeds from Afar, Flowers from the Reef: Re-Membering the Coral and Concrete of Kwajalein” resulted in a multimedia project comprised of a 450-page written dissertation/book manuscript and a 9-minute video piece. He was advised by Margaret Jolly, Greg Dening, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and Paul D’Arcy. He was also mentored by filmmakers Gary Kildea and David and Judith MacDougall for the film component of the project, which he is now expanding into a feature-length documentary film. Greg’s research has involved multi-sited ethnographic work between Australia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Hawai’i, and Japan. Within Japan he has met with the bereaved families of Japanese who died during the Pacific War in the Marshall Islands, as well as with long-line Japanese tuna fishermen in Kyushu who are currently based in those islands. Working on behalf of the Marshallese Cultural Center in Kwajalein Atoll, the Micronesian Seminar in Pohnpei, and other libraries throughout the region, he has also been in the process of helping to acquire prewar Japanese materials in Tokyo, Osaka, and Okinawa related to Japan’s Micronesian territories, such as archival film footage and popular music of the 1920s-1930s. His ongoing research deals with the enduring legacies of Japan in Micronesia, particularly Japanese war memory and genealogical ties to Marshall Islanders. He was awarded his doctorate in July 2008 and is currently based at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Information Studies, where he is revising his book and editing his film while pursuing further post-doctoral research. He holds an adjunct researcher position with the Australian National University and will be supported through 2010 with grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He is also currently collaborating on a feature film set in the Marshall Islands, and planning future creative collaborations with his younger brother Tim Dvorak, an up-and-coming actor based in Hollywood. Greg is a founding member of a small collective of Tokyo contemporary artists, called “Canteen.” For more detailed information, please refer to Greg’s curriculum vitae.