I’m a curator, writer, and cultural historian from and based in Los Angeles. My work currently focuses on the intersection of Japanese American art and cultural-spatial politics. I have a particular interest in the everyday lives of artists, the politics of cultural preservation, and Los Angeles from the 1970s to today. 

I’m the Associate Curator of Art at the Japanese American National Museum.

I received my PhD from the University of Southern California. My dissertation, “The View From Traction: Japanese American Art and Postwar Los Angeles,” blends art historical inquiry, participatory ethnography, and critical theory in an intimate cultural history of the artists who lived and worked at the former warehouse at 800 Traction Avenue from the early 1980s to their eviction in 2018. I trace their trajectories towards 800 Traction in the aftermath of World War II and uncover how they created transpacific, intergenerational, and multiracial networks, profoundly impacting the city during one of its most consequential periods art historical and urban change. Drawing from my long-term engagement with several of the former residents, their artworks, and archives, I articulate 800 Traction within a Japanese American production of space and production of culture.

My writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the LA Times, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Zocálo Public Square, among others. I recently organized exhibitions at the ONE Archives and Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles and the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain in Bordeaux. 

I’m an editor, too. Mashinka Firunts Hakopian’s The Institute of Other Intelligences was published by X Artists’ Books in 2022. The republication of Gene Oishi’s In Search of Hiroshi was released by Kaya Press in 2024. 

As a community organizer, I am embedded in a history of art and activism in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. 

I co-directed a small, independent exhibition space in Paris from 2014-2016. I’ve worked in public art, galleries, non-profits, museums, and artist studios in Los Angeles and in France.

I have an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Sorbonne and a BA in Art History from Pitzer College.

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