ARTIST STATEMENT

With a strong history of working with various immigrant and marginalized communities, I'm a community-based photographer, visual artist, and social practitioner. As an immigrant from Japan, with a Haitian husband and biracial daughter raised in Brooklyn, I'm interested in the mixing of those history and local culture.

For my past photography projects, I engaged with multiple marginalized communities within my NYC home neighborhoods—to photograph the color, joy and life of the people who are living in those diverse communities. I wanted to create something with a high value of meaningfulness for a handful of people who would be moved and feel grateful. With these artworks, I explore the intimacies of public engagement in different ways. It’s spending months getting to know senior citizens to learn and tell their stories, working collaboratively with Bed-Stuy neighbors on outdoor portraits, or immersing in barbershop environments to visually profile place as well as individuals, I build dialogues to go deeply into diverse processes of back-and-forth articulating and listening, as well as creating aesthetics of visual display.