Born in 1981, Tokyo. Tetsuya Mariko received attention in 2003 with his short film “Far East Apartment” when he was 21. The film was invited by 13 film festivals and won the awards in 7 festivals, including the Grand Prix of the Off-Theater Section from Yubari Int’l Film Festival. The following year, he introduced another short film “Mariko’s 30 Pirates,” which won the awards from 9 festivals including the Prize of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and, again, the Grand Prix from Yubari. After that, he worked as a behind-the-scenes director for Masanori Tominaga, Suzuki Matsuo and Masahiro Kobayashi. In 2007, he entered Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts and studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa. He made his feature debut in 2009 with “Yellow Kid” (2009) while he was still a student at Tokyo Unversity of the Arts. The film was invited by 18 Film Festivals including Rotterdam Int’ Film Festival, and was released theatrically in Japan. And in 2011, Asociacion de Amigos del Cine Experimental de Madrid held his retrospective and screened all his films. His new film “NINIFUNI” was selected to Locarno International Film Festival, one of the most authoritative film festivals in the world, and was also theatrically released in the major cities in Japan. In 2012, he joined an omnibus project and shot “FUN FAIR” in Malaysia. This film had a premiere screening at Okinawa International Film Festival.