Moki Bear Eagle is an Oglala Lakota storyteller from Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. For Moki, the spark of storytelling began with his father’s love for sharing traditional Lakota stories. Moki’s childhood was filled of cherished memories with his siblings creating their own fantasy worlds and producing simple animations. This was important for Moki, because as he struggled with anxiety to the point of mutism in his childhood, it was his love of storytelling that made it clear to him as a young adult that in order to heal, he should pursue performance in theater and film. This also led to sharing spoken word, music, and Moki teaching at his tribe’s college, sharing many of the traditional Lakota stories his father and many of the elders/mentors in his life shared. All the while, Moki returned back to the art of creating his own stories, performing them as theater in the schools of the geographic area of Pine Ridge Rez. After being selected for Playwrights Realm’s Inaugural Native American Artist Lab which culminated in a staged play reading in NYC and hearing the story come to life through the voices of performers, Moki realized that his original vision of the play as an animated film is not only possible, the momentum of it is happening!