Tara Aquino
is a queer, first-gen Filipinx American creative born and raised over the hill — the San Fernando Valley. After realizing she'd never be tall enough to play in the WNBA, she pivoted her hopes and dreams to something pretty much adjacent. In addition to being a former Pop Culture Editor at Complex Networks in New York, she’s written for Rolling Stone, worked on global campaigns for Nike and U.S. Soccer, produced a podcast with GLAAD, and created digital content for Snoop Dogg. Later, she served as Head of Content at FREE THE WORK, a nonprofit for underrepresented creators. Most recently, she produced The RE-CAP Show podcast, following the world of women’s sports with two soccer icons. On the daily, she’s an independent writer/producer and co-founder of the Fil-Am creative collective, A Bunch of Savages.
Cultivated by years of vibrant and storied experiences from coast to coast, her fiction writing focuses on new adult narratives that explore universal human truths through irreverent kids of immigrants trying to figure it out. Her co-written comedic feature, DON’T FREAK, made the 2022 Sundance x Black List Indigenous List, and she was named a CAPE New Writers Fellow in 2024.