Visual Arts

Warabe Aska

Warabe Aska is a painter and children’s book illustrator.

Teruo Adachi

Teruo (Terry) Adachi was born in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Life took him to Tottori-ken, Japan (ages 6 to 10), Vancouver, B.C. (his teen years), Jackfish and Valetta, Ontario work/farm camps during the war and, finally, Toronto in 1942. He studied painting and drawing in Toronto at Central Tech and the Ontario College of Art […]

Gloria Kagawa

Gloria Kagawa is an established printmaker, painter, and mixed media artist whose works have earned her several awards and are included in a number of public, private, and corporate collections. Gloria has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Gloria grew up in Denver, Colorado, during the 1950s […]

Takao Tanabe

Takao Tanabe is among the first wave of prominent Nisei Canadian artists, with a sixty-year painting career that still continues today. Born in Prince Rupert, BC to a fishing family, Tanabe was forcibly relocated away from the coast as a teenager, eventually ending up in Winnipeg, where he began his artistic studies. He went on […]

Teruko Kobayashi

Teruko ‘Terry’ Kobayashi was an art historian who wrote about Canadian folk arts. Born in British Columbia, she received her BA from the University of Toronto in 1966, and also attended the Ontario College of Education. She co-authored two books on folk art and furniture, published a number of articles in the 1970s and 1980s, […]

Alan Itakura

Alan Mitsuru Itakura was born on December 16, 1945 in an internment camp in Kaslo, BC just after the end of World War II. Just months after he was born, his family moved to Hamilton, Ontario where he grew up. After graduating from McMaster University (B.Sc. mathematics), he moved to Tokyo, Japan in 1968 to […]

Annie Koyama

Annie Koyama is a publisher and founder of the Toronto-based Koyama Press. After working in graphic arts, set painting, and film, Koyama found herself in advertising making commercials. After a surviving a terminal diagnosis, she decided to dedicate her time and resources to supporting primarily emerging artists. In 2007, she published Koyama Press’s first book, […]

Katherine (Kathi) Adachi

Katherine’s main creative outlet is photography, especially street, architectural and landscape. Despite studying research psychology (University of Toronto, BSc), her working life was spent in graphic design and editing. Katherine was the Publication Designer of secondary and elementary school courses for the Independent Learning Centre, Ontario Ministry of Education from 1979 until 2000, art directing […]

Suezan Aikins

Suezan Aikins is a Nova Scotia-based artist who grew up in Montreal and studied fine art at universities and art schools in New Brunswick, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. In 1984-1985, her lifelong dream was realized when she went to Japan to study traditional Japanese art techniques under internationally known artist Yoshida Toshi, and his master […]

Grace Eiko Thomson

Grace Eiko Thomson, curator, historian and a social activist, was the founding director-curator of the Japanese Canadian National Museum, (now Nikkei National Museum) in Burnaby, BC. Born in Steveston’s Japanese Fishermen’s Hospital, she was raised in the Powell Street neighbourhood of Vancouver until her family was forced to leave in 1942. They settled in the […]

Noboru Sawai

Noboru Sawai was an American- and Japanese-trained printmaker whose work was exhibited all over the world, including in Canada, Japan, Italy, and Israel. He was born in Takamatsu, Japan, and immigrated to the United States in 1950 after working as a cook’s assistant for the United States military in Japan for four years. He contracted […]

Taiga Chiba

Taiga Chiba is an artist whose work takes on a variety of forms, including printmaking, fabric arts, sculpture, and dance. He was born in Shizuoka, Japan and studied Studio Arts at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. After 6 and a half years of teaching Art in high schools in Shizuoka Prefecture, he immigrated to Canada […]

Steven Nunoda

Steven Nunoda is a Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but also uses a variety of other media, such as woodcarving, found-objects, photography, digital imaging, text and time-based strategies. His practice is research-oriented and usually produced a number of long-term, thematically interrelated works. One example is Ghostown, a project which explores […]

Bryce Kanbara

Bryce Kanbara is a visual artist, curator and proprietor of you me gallery in Hamilton, Ontario. He is a founding member and first administrator of Hamilton Artists Inc.; curatorial positions at the Burlington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant, and curator/chair of the Arts Committee at the Japanese Canadian Cultural […]

Meiko Ando

“Meiko Ando is a Butoh dancer/choreographer and printmaker who currently lives in Toronto. She completed her BA from the University of Waterloo in arts and dance. After graduating, Meiko went to Japan to perform with a Butoh dance company and researched architectural space and Japanese arts in festivals. Since returning to Canada in 1991, she […]