Namiko Kunimoto (2010) is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in gender, race, urbanization, photography, visual culture, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation.
Her essays include “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games” in Asia Pacific Japan Focus, “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” forthcoming in Art Journal and “Shiraga Kazuo: The Buddhist Hero” published in Shiraga/Motonaga: Between Action and the Unknown. Dr. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award, and the OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (2018). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and is an executive member of Japan Arts and Globalization and Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum. Her book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, was published in February 2017 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Namiko Kunimoto continues to work on her second book project, Imperial Animations: the Afterlives of Japanese Empire in Transpacific Contemporary Art. In 2023 she published an essay for Cindy Mochizuki’s art book, Autumn Strawberry, and short piece for Que Pasa magazine called “Reflections on Race in Higher Education.”
