Background
Hanay Geiogamah was born in 1945 in Lawton, Oklahoma, United States to a Kiowa father and Delaware mother.
Hanay Geiogamah was born in 1945 in Lawton, Oklahoma, United States to a Kiowa father and Delaware mother.
Hanay graduated from Anadarko High School and studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma. He later attended Indiana University Bloomington.
Following his graduation, he landed a job as the public affairs liaison for Commissioner of Indian Affairs Louis Bruce within the Bureau of Indian Affairs under President Richard Nixon.
In late 1971, Geiogamah formed a theater group at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City's Lower East Side.
In 1980, Geiogamah became the author of New Native American Drama: Three Plays, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Geiogamah later formed the widely acclaimed American Indian Dance Theatre, which gave its first public performance in 1987 with Geiogamah as its director and Barbara Schwei as its producer.
Geiogamah served as producer and co-producer for the TBS multimedia project, The Native Americans: Behind the Legends, Beyond the Myths aired on TNT from 1993 to 1996. Geiogamah was co-producer on "The Broken Chain", which told the story of the Iroquois Confederacy during colonial times and also for "Geronimo". In 1994, he was co-producer for "Lakota Woman: Return to Wounded Knee", and a year later he was again co-producer for "Tecumseh", the story of the Shawnee leader who fought against the United States during Tecumseh's War and the War of 1812. Geiogamah returned in 1996 as producer for TNT's "Crazy Horse", the Native American war leader of the Oglala Lakota.
In 2009, Geiogamah was co-executive producer for The Only Good Indian, an independent Western starring Cherokee actor Wes Studi.
In 2010, Geiogamah joined co-host Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies for “Race in Hollywood: Native American Images on Film”, a series that looked at both positive and negative images of the Hollywood Indian.
Geiogamah serves on the National Film Preservation Board established in 1988 as an advisory body to the Librarian of Congress' National Film Registry.