Dr. Eliana Ritts (she/her) is an Ocean Nexus Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Rhode Island, working at the intersection of Indigenous media, representational politics, and ocean equity. She has worked with Indigenous media producers in Taiwan for over a decade, centering media sovereignty and cultures of production. More recently, her work has turned to the politics of representation in ocean media, including the curation of Driftlines, a teaching collection of ocean documentaries united by shared commitments to ethical, relational production and advancing social equity in ocean contexts. Alongside her academic research, Eliana is active in curation, media production, and public anthropology. She serves on the programming committee of the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival and on the board of the City Reliquary Museum in New York City. Other projects include programming the Driftlines Ocean Justice Film Festival (2026), co-curating the art/anthropology workshop series Sensefield 感野 (2023), directing the documentary short Tea for Taiwan (2019), and screening films for the Climate Film Festival.

Dr. Yoshitaka Ota is the founder of Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus, a scholarly network of ocean researchers who devoted their research to advance ocean equity. Dr. Ota believes that all ocean policy and intervention shall be ‘anti-inequity’, explicitly designed and implemented to eliminate systemic issues, such as racism, colonial legacy and gender discrimination through ocean governance. This conceptual core is stemmed from a mount of evidence that Ocean Nexus offers by the research and further the network find that any conservation and sustainability effort for ocean environment ultimately fails to deliver the outputs without addressing social equity as the outcome.

At the University of Rhode Island, Dr. Ota is a Professor of Marine Affairs. Dr. Ota graduated University College London with Ph.D. in Anthropology and worked in Universities and research institutes of UK, Japan, Canada and US as a researcher and professor. He has over 100 research publications, book chapters and reports. Dr. Ota has held the Professor of Practice position at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in University of Washington and have had various visiting and affiliate positions in US and Canada. He also has the Executive Masters of Public Administration from Evans Policy School in University of Washington.