Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada
Bio
Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada is an artist, curator, author and co-author of several books including The Kimono Inspiration: Art and Art To Wear In America; Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now and Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped-Resist Dyeing. She has curated exhibitions at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Thailand. Her own work has been exhibited widely since the 1970s, including at the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery and the International Textile Fair in Kyoto. She is president of World Shibori Network, founder of Slow Fiber Studios, producer of the Natural Dye Workshop film series and co-chair of the 10th International Shibori Symposium in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has a BFA from Kyoto and an MFA from the US, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China. She has been a consultant to designers in India, the US, and Japan, has been a costume designer to Colleen Atwood for the movie Memoirs of a Geisha and worked with Korean-American fashion designer Christina Kim of dosa, inc. For over forty years, she has led dozens of art, architecture, and textile study tours to Japan, India, France, Italy, and China. In 2010, Yoshiko Wada was titled as a “Distinguished Craft Educator – Master of Medium” by the James Renwick Alliance. She now continues to lead a wide range of workshops and lectures, with an emphasis on sustainability, tradition, and innovation in design in the subjects of natural dye, resist – dyeing and the re-use of material.