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Home / Graduate Showcase / Lava Alapai, MFA 2025

Lava Alapai, MFA 2025

Lava Alapai

The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Lava Alapai, MFA. Lava’s graduate thesis is a full length play entitled TikTok Zoom; Or, That One Time in 2020.

Lava is a multiethnic scriptwriter and director from Okinawa, Japan. She was raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she caught the dastardly theatre bug and made short films that she wrote, directed, and edited with two VHS players and her best friend’s camcorder. After graduating with an MFA in acting from the California Institute of the Arts, Lava toured internationally as a puppeteer. She has penned over five plays and three TV pilots while working on completing her MFA in Creative Writing- Theatre at UBC. She is a proud member of the Stage Directors & Choreographers Society (SDC) and Dramatists Guild.

It’s December 2020: the world’s on fire, everyone’s baking bread, and Ash—a software engineer —is clinging to sanity via code and caffeine. Enter his long-lost dad, Vincent, who waltzes back into his life via TikTok, memory loss in tow, like it’s not been 11 years of radio silence. What follows? Chaos, dance battles, and emotional landmines. TikTok Zoom is a pandemic-era dark comedy about estrangement, identity, and what happens when your past shows up uninvited—and joins your internet challenge. Think Black Mirror, but with more hugs and fewer robots. Maybe.

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Request more information about Lava’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.

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