Wong-Kalu is Cultural Ambassador for the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. Wong-Kalu is a founder of the Kulia Na Mamo transgender health project and cultural director of a Hawaiian public charter school. She is also a former Hawaiian-language kumu at
Leeward Community College. As a candidate for the
Office of Hawaiian Affairs, she was one of the first transgender candidates for statewide political office in the United States. She also served as the Chair of the Oʻahu Island Burial Council, which oversees the management of Native Hawaiian burial sites and ancestral remains. Wong-Kalu was the subject of the feature documentary film
Kumu Hina, directed by
Dean Hamer and
Joe Wilson.
Kumu Hina premiered as the closing night film in the
Hawaiʻi International Film Festival in 2014 and won several awards including best documentary at the
Frameline Film Festival and the
GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary. It was nationally broadcast on
PBS in 2015 where it won the
Independent Lens Audience Award. In 2022, Wong-Kalu was one of the curators for a
Bishop Museum exhibit on the
Waikīkī's Healer Stones of
Kapaemāhū.
Filmmaker Subsequent to the release of
Kumu Hina, Wong-Kalu wrote an educational children's version of the film,
A Place in the Middle, which premiered at the
Berlin International Film Festival and
Toronto International Film Festival for Kids and is featured on PBS learning media. Wong-Kalu, along with filmmaker Dean Hammer and director Joe Wilson, produced the short film,
Lady Eva and feature documentary
Leitis in Waiting about the struggle of the
indigenous transgender community in the South Pacific Kingdom of
Tonga. Both films screened and won awards at
AFI Docs, the
LA Film Festival,
Margaret Mead Film Festival,
FIFO film festival, and Festival of Commonwealth Film and were broadcast on
PBS/Pacific Heartbeat,
ARTE,
Maori TV,
TV France and
NITV. Since the production of
Leitis in Waiting, the film co-directed by Kumu Hina has recently been granted the GLAAD Media Award, which is awarded to documentaries that accurately portray issues among LGBTQI+ communities globally. In 2020, Wong-Kalu directed, produced and narrated
Kapaemahu, an animated short film based on the Hawaiian story of four legendary māhū who brought the healing arts from
Tahiti to Hawaiʻi and imbued their powers on giant boulders that still stand on
Waikīkī Beach after the introduction of the U.S. government and tourism. Narrated in the rare
Ni'ihau dialect of Hawaiian, the film premiered at the
Tribeca Film Festival and for the Grand Jury Award, which qualified for the Oscars at Animayo in 2020. In 2022,
a book based on the film was published. ==Awards and honors==