Tina Takemoto

Tina Takemoto

Work in the Exhibition
On the Line, 2018, 6:43

Inspired by prewar cannery workers in San Diego, On the Line offers a queer meditation on the Japanese American women who cleaned the tuna, worked the assembly line, and found same-sex intimacy amid sake and fish guts while the men were off to sea.

Tina Takemoto is an artist, scholar, and Dean of Humanities and Sciences at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Their work examines issues of race, queer identity, memory, and grief. Takemoto’s research explores queer Asian American history and identity including the hidden dimensions of same-sex intimacy and queer sexuality for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II.

Takemoto has presented artwork and performances internationally and has received grants funded by Art Matters, ArtPlace, the Fleishhacker Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Looking for Jiro received Best Experimental Film Jury Award at the Austin LGBT International Film Festival.

Takemoto’s research appears in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Afterimage, Millennium Film Journal, Art Journal, GLQ, Journal of Visual Culture, Hyphen, Densho Encyclopedia, Performance Research, Radical Teacher, Theatre Survey, Women and Performance, and the anthologies Queering Asian American Art, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories and Thinking Through the Skin. Takemoto serves on the board of the Queer Cultural Center and is co-founder of Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts.