To call Emmai Alaquiva a multihyphenate would be an understatement. The multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and musician now primarily represents the local filmmaking scene as a documentarian whose works cover urgent issues in Pittsburgh and beyond.

It’s a pursuit that has resulted in four Emmy wins and being featured on Good Morning America, and in Forbes Magazine and The New York Times.

And it all started at Waffle Wopp, an East Liberty-based media project led by Carnegie Mellon University students that focused on teens.

“I began filming small vignettes in order to capture the essence of our students and naturally fell in love with that branch of storytelling,” Alaquiva tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “Ever since I picked up the camera, I never looked back and always had a constant love affair with telling stories through the lens.”

The Wilkinsburg native started in music with his rap group, Pensoulzinakup, and, in 2011, created an arts education program called Hip-Hop On Lock. As a photographer, he’s captured images of subjects ranging from local figures like activist Leon Ford and former mayor Bill Peduto, to music heavyweight Pharrell Williams and lifestyle maven Martha Stewart. He also currently represents over 175,000 creative professionals across the commonwealth as the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts vice chair. 

While he calls music his “first creative passion,” he became “fascinated by the power of visual narratives to amplify emotions and tell stories in a way that transcends words.” That fascination has spun into films and other visual media focused on issues affecting Black Americans. 

In 2022, he combined film and photography for OPTICVOICES: Mama’s Boys, an August Wilson African American Cultural Center exhibition highlighting mothers who lost sons to systemic violence. More recently, he shed light on a serious health crisis affecting Black women with The Ebony Canal: A Story of Black Infant Mortality. Alaquiva says the latter, which features narration by Academy Award-winning actor Viola Davis, is “set to go on an exciting international film festival tour.”

“Every subject I choose to cover is born out of a commitment to amplify voices and shed light on injustices that have been systematically silenced,” says Alaquiva. “These issues, whether they’re about police violence or the crisis of Black infant mortality, are not just statistics or headlines — they are stories of lives, communities, and legacies disrupted or erased by structural inequities.”

He says his next documentary project will cover Dr. Freddie Fu, a revered orthopaedic surgeon at UPMC who passed away in 2021. Alaquiva will also direct his first feature narrative film this coming summer.

Regardless of the project, Alaquiva wants his work, including his film, to have a positive impact. 

“Every frame, every story is an opportunity to confront uncomfortable truths and to honor those who have been overlooked,” he says. “I see myself as a cinematic poet; my pen is a camera and my work is about using art and advocacy to build bridges between awareness and action — and to remind the world of the humanity that lies at the heart of change.”