Vancouver

Robert Shiozaki

Robert Shiozaki is a ceramic artist with forty-plus years of experience working with clay. His formative studies were in Vancouver at the Vancouver School of Art, and Kyoto, Japan, at the Kyoto School of Fine Arts. He teaches carving and modelling at Totally Ceramics in Surrey and the Port Moody Arts Centre, where he has […]

Barb Miiko Gravlin

Barbara ‘Miiko’ Nishimura- Gravlin was born in Tashme, the largest of Japanese Canadian internment camps in B.C. At an early age, she became an abstract painter under mentors, Richard Gorman and Mashel Teitelbaum and Kazuo Nakamura. In 1965, she was the recipient of a Canada Council Travel grant in Painting for six months tenure studying […]

Sally Nakamura

Satoshi (Sally) Nakamura was born on Powell Street in Vancouver. He enjoyed a varied artistic life as a singer, actor and entertainer. In Vancouver, he took voice training with Gideon Hicks, a well-known baritone, conductor, and music teacher. He also loved to sing popular songs and would entertain at the Japanese language school. He could […]

Kumano

Kumano was an early synth music artist who released an album in 1980 called simply Kumano. His father was Roy Kumano. His song I’ll Cry for You made the US and UK dance charts. The song peaked at 24 on the US dance charts.

Teresa Kobayashi

Teresa Kobayashi is a master koto player, the daughter of renowned koto sensei Miyoko Kobayashi. She also plays the shamisen and shakuhachi and danced odori for 27 years. As a child, she was primarily interested in dance, and began learning the Hanayagi style of nihonbuyo (odori dance) at the age of six. However, she found […]

Rachel Greenaway

R.M. GREENAWAY lives in Nelson, BC. She has written the acclaimed six-book BC Blues crime series and several short stories, and is now contemplating a new series. Check out her work or get in touch through rmgreenaway.com.

Kaya

Kaya is a vocalist and songwriter based in Burnaby, BC with a Bachelor of Music in Jazz from Capilano University. As a queer woman of colour, she values diversity and representation, and strives to create inclusive spaces in the Vancouver music scene. Kaya draws influences from artists such as Lake Street Dive, Nina Simone, Rebecca […]

Hiromi Goto

Hiromi Goto is a writer and author of Chorus of Mushrooms, The Kappa Child, Hopeful Monsters, for adults, and The Water of Possibility, Half World, and Darkest Light for youth. She co-wrote Wait Until Late Afternoon (poetry) with David Bateman. Showa Shinzan, an NFB animated short directed by Alison Reiko Loader, was co-written with Jesse […]

Carolyn Nakagawa

Carolyn Nakagawa is a poet and playwright whose work has appeared in theatres around Greater Vancouver and in various literary journals across Canada, including Ricepaper, Room, EVENT, and CV2. She was a finalist for the Malahat Review’s 2017 Open Season contest in the poetry category. Born and raised in the suburbs of Vancouver, Carolyn studied […]

Number One Son

Number One Son was a Vancouver Asian Canadian folk-rock band. Its members included Martin Kobayakawa, Kuan Foo, Sean Gunn, and later Terry Watada. They released two albums: Number One Son and Hockeynight in Chinatown.

Masaki Watanabe

Masaki Watanabe is a journalist/translator and a jazz musician with an international background. Born in Tokyo in 1945 to a Japanese Finnish father and a Japanese mother, he graduated from International Christian University in 1966 after which he joined Reuters news agency in London. He has since worked as a Reuters correspondent in North America […]

Saeko Usukawa

Saeko Usukawa was an editor for everything from alternative-culture magazines to major publishing house Douglas & McIntyre. Born in Lemon Creek internment camp, Saeko grew up in Toronto. After studying briefly at university, she quickly became the youngest editor at Macmillan Publishers. She also became involved in the women’s movement and protests against Apartheid and […]

Jeff Chiba Stearns

Jeff Chiba Stearns is an Emmy® nominated and Webby award-winning animation and documentary filmmaker, as well as an acclaimed author and illustrator. After graduating from the Emily Carr University with a degree in Film Animation, he founded Vancouver-based boutique animation studio and publishing company Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. in 2001. Jeff’s short and feature length […]

Katsuyoshi Morita

Katsuyoshi Morita was the author of Powell Street Monogatari, a chronicle of stories from the prewar Japanese Canadian neighbourhood of Powell Street and Morita’s experiences in the internment camp of Greenwood during the forced removal. Powell Street Monogatari was originally written in Japanese, and translated into English by Eric Sokugawa (translation published in 1989).

Sadashi Inuzuka

Sadashi Inuzuka is a visual artist with a background in ceramics who also creates installations and public art projects. Born in Japan, he had a life-long ambition to immigrate to North America and become an artist. He received a diploma from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1985, and went on to […]