Our story is just beginning. It's also centuries old.
The Name
We carry the name of Hawaiʻi's last reigning monarch with intention. Queen Liliʻuokalani was a composer, a storyteller, and a leader who understood that a people's stories are their sovereignty. A century after her music and words carried our lāhui through its darkest chapter, her name marks a place being built for the next one: a studio where Hawaiʻi tells its own stories — and keeps them.
What We’re Building
Queen Liliʻuokalani Studios is a film and entertainment campus in development on Hawaiian Home Lands . The vision: professional sound stages, a 500-seat theatre, a cultural museum, and immersive experiences rooted in the moʻolelo of these islands — infrastructure that keeps production, jobs, and creative value in Hawaiian hands. QLS rises on Hawaiian Home Lands, and the homestead communities are partners in it: their voices shape what gets built, and its benefits return to them first.
The campus will also be home to the QLS Store — our flagship retail shop for QLS-branded apparel and goods, designed by our own team. The first releases sold out. The next are in development now.
Where We Are
This is a project in motion, not a promise:
Our land is secured. Campus design is underway. Our first merchandise collection — designed in-house — sold out. And our Founders Hui is growing: a circle of supporters who saw what this could be and stepped in early.
There is a long road ahead, and we're walking it the way this place deserves — deliberately, with the right partners, and without shortcuts.
Who We Are
Patti Ann Tancayo — Owner & CEO The founder and driving force of QLS, Patti has carried this vision from idea to secured land, investing personally in every step. For her, the studio is legacy work: a place her moʻopuna — and everyone's — will inherit.
Iwalani McBrayer — Community Liaison & Community Relations Iwalani is the bridge between QLS and the communities it belongs to. A Hawaiian Homesteader from Kapolei, she brings decades of community organizing and relationships built the only way they can be — over years, face to face, in the community. At QLS, she carries the homestead communities' voices into the project and the project's commitments back out, making sure "built with the homesteaders" is a practice, not a promise.
Shane Pale — Director of Brand & Product Development Shane leads QLS's brand, design, and product work — from the kapa-inspired marks on our first collection to the digital home you're reading now. A Native Hawaiian creative director, his work is grounded in the belief that design is another way of carrying moʻolelo.
What Guides Us
Moʻolelo first. Every product, every frame, every design begins with story.
ʻĀina and lāhui. Built on Hawaiian Home Lands, for the benefit of Hawaiians — jobs, training, and ownership that stay home.
Native Hawaiian designed. Not inspired-by. Designed-by.