U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship Program
US-Japan Creative Artist Biographies

2017 Artists

Visual Artist

Elaine Buckholtz June-November, 2017

Elaine Buckholtz lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Her recent work utilizes video and light in relation to sculptural forms, digital prints, and preexisting sites in architecture and nature under the cover of darkness. Buckholtz has a background in visual and lighting design for the stage, and a significant aspect of her visual art has involved direct experiences and immersive environments for the viewer to engage in – the materials of her work have included light, vision, and perception in relation to objects as large as cathedrals and as small as a pair of glasses. In Japan she will be researching light art, architectural lighting and media facades, and related technological innovations.

http://www.elainebuckholtz.com/

Writer

Jami Nakamura Lin March 29 – August 2, 2017

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Chicago-based writer whose work explores the complex intersections of cultural identity, religion, and mental illness, and the ways mythology reflects a society’s desires and fears. As a Japanese-American woman whose family was placed in incarceration camps during the 1940s, Lin is interested in how xenophobia and nationalism often stem from creating a myth of the Other. Her current novel, loosely influenced by Japanese folklore, focuses on oni (roughly translated, demons) both literally and as metaphor for outsider. In Japan, she will research and visit sites and shrines relevant to the country’s rich mythology, as well as study oral storytelling and folk Shinto.

https://jaminakamuralin.com/

Theater Artist

Kimi Maeda July-December, 2017

Kimi Maeda is a Japanese-American theater artist based in Columbia, South Carolina who makes intimate, cross-disciplinary visual performances. Since 2001, Maeda has designed sets and costumes in numerous productions in the US and Europe. Of these, her solo performance ephemera is a collection of sand drawing and shadow puppet pieces that engages memory, home, and trans-cultural identity. In Japan, Maeda will spend her time in Hamada City in Shimane Prefecture, studying the masks, puppets, costumes, music, and rehearsal process of Iwami kagura, a traditional Japanese Shinto dance originating in Shimane. She will also collect audio and video interviews with local kagura artists in Hamada.

http://www.kimimaeda.com/

Architect

Quynh Vantu December 2017- June 2018

Quynh Vantu is a licensed architect and artist based in Virginia. Her art practice considers a movement-based engagement with architecture, exploring our physical relationships and interactions with built environments and spatial surroundings. Drawing from her upbringing in the American South, Vantu’s work stems from influences of porch culture and “southern hospitality,” enacting social virtues and exchanges in the architectural interventions she creates. In Japan she will use the threshold as a methodological tool, to explore how this element is the most active space within architecture – and in effect becomes the physical manifestation of movement, a social condition that offers engagement with one another, and an implement to perform cultural ideals.

http://www.quynhvantu.com/

Choreographer

Vanessa Voskuil April to July, 2017

Vanessa Voskuil is a Minneapolis-based choreographer, director, performer, writer, designer, and teaching artist. Her works range from large community-inclusive performance works to ensemble and solo works for site-specific locations and theater settings, and are informed by the theater training methods of Yoshi Oida, as well as years of studying qigong and tai chi. Since 2008, she has also made a series of dance films. Following her formal study of noh theater in Osaka and Kyoto, Voskuil plans to develop a community of participants for a new work that would be directly influenced by this study of noh, and anticipates showing this work in Kyoto as well as Osaka.

http://vanessavoskuil.com/

US-Japan Creative Artist BiographiesUS-Japan Creative Artist Biographies