We recently connected with Dawn Mahealani Douglas and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Dawn Mahealani thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
2025 was full of meaningful projects that helped expand my company’s reach. We started the year on a high from our first company television feature on Fox 5 Good Day Atlanta, promoting Disney Studios’ Moana 2 and our performance at the Atlanta premiere events where I choreographed the opening number. Working for Disney in any capacity can be a dream come true for many performers. It was extra special for a company that seeks to educate audiences about Polynesian cultures. Disney Studios put a spotlight on our cultures and for a small company like mine, it meant running into more and more people in public who know who we are from working on these projects. The next one came in the spring with Disney Studios’ Live Action Lilo & Stitch that gave us another feature on Fox 5 Good Day Atlanta and more movie premiere events, and it did not end there. Look for us in July 2026 with Disney Studios’ Live Action Moana.
As a creative, I have had a vision of my show, “Mahealani’s Polynesian Revue,” that has been constantly evolving in my head and I had two opportunities to bring it to big stages without budget constraints in 2025. The first was thanks to a grant from Chamblee Public Arts Commission that allowed me to produce two Performances in the Park with a cast of 10 taking audiences on a journey through the South Pacific islands of Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Aotearoa New Zealand with stunning costumes and fire. The second was a residency at Callaway Resort & Gardens where I produced Hawaiian Night every Friday in Summer with the same kind of show, and it sold out nearly every week. We will be bringing it back in summer 2026 with a longer evening of pre-show cultural activities, dinner, and show.
We ended the year on another high note as one of the headline acts of the Georgia National Fair, where a small cast of dancers and fire knife dancer performed 26 shows in 11 days on the All-American Stage. It is rare to see cultural acts as main acts at fairs, but my company’s reputation for high quality, family entertainment helped us get there, and it was one of the highlights of my career and life so far. It was like a childhood dream of running off to the circus, being surrounded by amazing acts, food, and novelties while entertaining up to 600,000 guests that visited the fair this year.
Dawn Mahealani, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am an award-winning dancer, business owner, and teaching artist named Best Entertainer Atlanta by the Atlanta Award Program, and I have performed around 300 Polynesian shows a year for the past 9 years in 11 states and 3 countries–over 2,000 shows to date. The founder of Mahealani’s Polynesian Entertainment, an award-winning entertainment company named Best Event Entertainment Services Georgia by the Georgia Business Journal, I turned my solo performances into group performances and a stage show like tourists see in Hawaii. Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders in the Atlanta area have come together to relive childhood memories of their cultural dances or to be trained for the first time to share their culture with the broader community in a part of the country where no other professional Polynesian dance company exists. Not only does the company bring joy and a sense of pride to its performers, but it enriches the lives of the community at large. Each summer through the Georgia Libraries Summer Reading Program, Mahealani’s Polynesian Entertainment has reached children in 93 libraries with themed programs like “Adventures in Polynesia” and “Colors of Polynesia” that tell stories of life on the islands of Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, and Aotearoa New Zealand through the indigenous lens of traditional songs and dances the children can participate in during the hour. 74 schools from preschool to college level across Georgia have also benefitted from cultural programs with the most recent program of “Māori Culture and New Zealand” being chosen by the Teaching Museum of Fulton County for meeting Georgia Middle School Learning Objectives relating to indigenous cultures and impacts of colonization. Other audiences have spanned the range of birthdays and weddings, to corporate events for both employees and customers, and to large sporting events and attractions. Being chosen to represent Disney Studios in the Southeast/Atlanta market for movie releases has also brought more attention and television coverage for Mahealani’s Polynesian Entertainment in the past two years.
From beginning dancing solo for private events in 2017, I quickly realized my vision of producing shows like I admired and performed in while in Hawaii right here in Georgia, culminating in winning a grant from the Chamblee Public Arts Commission for a Performance in the Park with a cast of 10 in 2025 and a residency on Friday nights in summer at Callaway Resort & Gardens: both events open to the public and selling out most dates. My dance education began at the age of 3, exploring different genres of dance, but I love to share a photo where I attended a Hawaiian luau at the age of 7 and said I wanted to be a hula dancer when I grew up. It was not until adulthood, that I connected with a kumu hula for training in Hawaii and connected with my Polynesian ancestry, but I have committed my life to sharing the Polynesian culture through its performing arts around the world.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
My mission statement has remained the same since the start-up of my company in 2017: Mahealani’s Polynesian Entertainment perpetuates Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures through entertaining and educational experiences and strives to promote the values of aloha. I believe in the power of entertainment to teach audiences lessons about life and love. If they enjoy their experience, they will remember key points that we strive to get across. For example, aloha is not only a greeting, but love and a way of living that includes kindness, unity, pleasantness, humility, and patience.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Everyone can and should support the arts. Individuals learn in different ways and learning through participating or watching performing arts is one of those ways, not to mention the beauty it brings to the world. Think about how attending a live show automatically changes your mood for the rest of the day and maybe even stays with you the rest of the week or becomes a core memory. You are also guaranteed to learn about other lives and cultures different from your own. Support the arts by attending events and voting for representatives and budgets in your own community that support the work of performing artists.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dawnmahealani.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/dawndouglas1
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/dawndouglastalent
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/dawndouglas10
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/dawndouglas
- Other: https://tiktok.com/dawndouglas10
Image Credits
Photo credit to Tatem Spearman.