Rachel Hengchua

Rachel Hengchua builds the rooms where people meet immersive work for the first time. She is the VR & Immersive Programmer for the Portland Panorama film festival, where her studio has hosted the VR Pavilion since the festival’s first year: a curated, ticketed space of hand-selected films that grew in 2026 to four days at the Old Moody Building in Zidell Yards. As co-founder of Hungry Mantis, a Portland 360/VR studio, she directs, edits and produces films that educate and inspire, from a 360 docuseries about women pilots to a dome film shot in the Andaman Sea, and she has brought VR to Girls in Aviation Day and to family and youth workshops at the Portland Art Museum, NW Documentary, Portland Community College and the University of Oregon, where she earned her master’s in multimedia journalism. She has served on the board of the International Virtual Reality Professionals Association, leading its educational programming, and has spoken at IVRPA Belfast and AWE EU. For Full Spectrum she is one of the organizers.