Emma Nishimura

Emma Nishimura (she/her) works with a diversity of media, including printmaking, photography, sculpture, and installation. Her work addresses ideas of memory and loss that are rooted within family stories and inherited narratives. For the past decade, Emma’s research and art practice has focused on the experiences her family and thousands of other Japanese Canadians endured throughout their forced incarceration during the Second World War. Her work explores this history and the reverberations these experiences have had throughout the subsequent generations.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON; the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA; and the Taimiao Art Gallery, Beijing, China. Her work is in a number of public and private collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Japanese Canadian National Museum and the Library of Congress. Emma has won awards and grants from the Ontario Arts Council, Open Studio, the International Print Center New York, Art in Print, and The Print Center. In 2018 she was the recipient of the Queen Sonja Print Award. Emma received her MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her BA from the University of Guelph. Emma is an Assistant Professor at OCAD University.