Justina Mattos, Associate Professor of Drama
Associate Professor Justina Mattos’s areas of expertise are in new play development, and theatrical history and criticism, focused particularly on the local theatre of Hawaiʻi.
Posted on July 12, 2024
Justina Mattos, an alumna of the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, is now an associate professor of drama at her alma mater. Mattos does it all: she is a playwright, an actor of stage and film, a producer and director of local theatre. Based at UH Hilo’s Department of Performing Arts, her notable areas of expertise and most significant contributions to her field are in new play development, and theatrical history and criticism, focused particularly on the local theatre of Hawaiʻi.
Mattos grew up attending public schools on Oʻahu and in Hilo. She first pursued higher education at UH Hilo where she received her bachelor of arts in liberal studies with an emphasis in theatre in 1990. While earning that degree, in 1989 she earned a certificate in Hawaiian culture, which included three years of Hawaiian language study.
Mattos received her master of arts in theatre from the University of Oregon in 1993, and then later received her doctor of philosophy in theatre history and criticism from UH Mānoa in 2002, where her dissertation was on “The Development of Hawaiʻi’s Kumu Kahua Theatre and its Core Repertory: The ‘Local’ Plays of Sakamoto, Lum and Kneubuhl.”
Mattos returned to teach at UH Hilo in 2003 as a lecturer for the communication and English departments. She started her current faculty position at the performing arts department in 2017 and received tenure in 2022.
- UH Hilo thespian, playwright, director and award-winning educator Justina Mattos receives tenure (UH Hilo Stories, Oct. 2022)
Playwright
As a playwright, Mattos specializes in creating local plays for young audiences. In the last several years, she has written and produced two original Hawaiian language musicals for children: Kakahiaka and Moʻo Huelo: Tale of a Tail.
Mattos also has written two local Pidgin adaptations of Shakespearean plays, intended for middle school and high school actors and audiences: Oh, Hello! (a teen Othello) produced in summer 2020, and Hō ka Hū: No Ack! (a teen Much Ado About Nothing) produced in summer 2023.
- Hō Ka Hū: No Ack! UH Hilo drama professor and local-kine playwright Justina Mattos’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing presented on campus lawn (UH Hilo Stories, July 2023)
But it’s not just her own writing that Mattos focuses on; she also nurtures the development of other playwrights, both local and from around the world.
“When Covid forced us all into our homes in early 2000, I started an online playreading group to help actors keep their performance skills honed,” she says. “That group almost immediately transformed into a platform for playwrights to develop and workshop new works.”
Mattos says unfettered by geography and growing by word-of-mouth, the online group became known as the Keakalehua Playreading Hui.
“It now has participants throughout the pae ʻāina (group of islands) of Hawaiʻi and across the globe,” she says. “Many of the plays developed there have gone on to receive fully staged productions in Hawaiʻi and other parts of the U.S.”
Producer/Director
Along with her own writing and support of other writers is another important contribution of Mattos to local theater: directing and producing. Recent examples of this are original works presented at the UH Hilo Performing Arts Center — most recently Moore, Banyan, and Wordsworth — in both Hawaiian and English languages.
- UH Hilo Performing Arts Center presents world premier of delightful children’s musical, Wordsworth the Poet (UH Hilo Stories, Nov. 2022)
Actor
Mattos is also an accomplished actor of both stage and film.
A recent role is one of the two lead parts in the independent film Mermaids’ Lament, filmed on Hawaiʻi Island and released in 2023. It is the story of two women who find strength in each other despite their personal struggles and is chock-full of UH Hilo talent from cast to crew.
“In terms of genre, I think the film is similar to Thelma and Louise, in that it is a ‘buddy-pic’ for women,” says Mattos. “Thematically, the film deals with a few things: One, women finding ways to survive in a male-dominated world; two, the careless destruction of our natural resources; and three, mental illness, how it is defined and how it is treated.”
- Mermaids’ Lament: Film project chock-full of UH Hilo talent in cast and crew (UH Hilo Stories, Sept. 2021)
Theater as an educational tool
Mattos, who received the UH Board of Regents Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2021, has always been interested in the use of theatre as an educational tool.
“It is useful for teaching all kinds of things, like history, empathy, personal and social awareness, teamwork, other soft skills, as well as concepts in STEM fields,” she says. “What I found through producing Hawaiian language and bi-lingual productions for young audiences is that theatre is an incredible tool for language acquisition, and the learning isn’t limited to just those in the audience.”
“The process of researching, rehearsing, and performing in a new language is a very effective way for actors to learn or become more fluent in a new language,” she adds. “It sounds kind of obvious when I say it out loud now, but I don’t think it’s something people really think about. I believe we will be seeing more of that kind of work happening throughout Hawaiʻi in the years to come.”
A tenet of Associate Professor Mattos in all her work is that theater is a collaborative art form. She is almost always working collaboratively with colleagues, members of the community, school children or university students in many different ways on many different projects.
In her teaching at UH Hilo, she uses an experiential style, where her students are learning as much from each other and by their own activities as they are from their professor.
“Usually, when I am directing a play, most of the actors and technical team are students, learning their crafts through the hands-on experience of working on a production,” says Mattos. “I also mentor and encourage students to look toward each other as collaborative partners creating original works.”
Her playwriting students’ scripts are offered as original material for acting and directing students to use in their projects. And she actively encourages her performing arts students to begin developing their own body of work while undergraduates instead of waiting until they graduate from college. “My goal is for them to help each other to make that happen,” she says.
Mattos’s collaborative relationships with her students do not stop as soon as they graduate.
“I have co-starred with a former student in the indie-film Mermaids’ Lament; commissioned a former student to write music for an original play that I wrote, E Lele, forthcoming; hired former students to choreograph for plays that I have directed in Hilo and on Oʻahu; I invite former students to participate as actors and playwrights in Hui Keakalehua; and more.”
Mattos is currently collaborating with musicians on Oʻahu to write the music for a new play called Hīnano’s Nose. It will be a local adaptation of the classic romantic drama, Cyrano de Bergerac.
She also is working with a team from Honolulu’s Kumu Kahua Theatre in an effort to compile and publish an anthology of their most significant local plays over the past 50 years as a follow-up to their original anthology, Kumu Kahua Plays, published in 1983 and now out of print.
Increasing accessibility
Looking to the future, Mattos says she is intrigued by the idea of adapting classic plays to make them relevant for contemporary local audiences of Hawaiʻi.
“Growing up in Hawaiʻi, we were sometimes exposed to classic pieces of literature or plays for the universal human themes they explored — love, personal sacrifice, for example — but the language and settings of the work often made those pieces difficult to understand,” she says. “I hope to write more adaptations of Shakespearean plays or other classics, to help make the works more accessible to people here and now.”
Since the onset of the pandemic, Mattos has explored creating digital productions, to make original works available to the community online.
“I decided to try working in a local film production to get a better feel for how the pros do it, and was reassured to learn that we were doing things right,” she says, referring to her work in Mermaids’ Lament. “I would like to do more digital productions, when the opportunities arise.”
Learn more about Justina Mattos on her website.
By Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
