Etsuko Ichikawa

Etsuko Ichikawa is a Tokyo-born, Seattle-based, multimedia artist, filmmaker, and activist.

Ichikawa’s working media varies broadly: socially engaged art, performance, film, installation, sculpture, drawing, and poetry, which together brings a unique interdisciplinary approach that she uses to tell profound stories about our human dignity and the irreplaceable earth that we live on. She graduated from Tokyo Zokei University in Japan in 1987 with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. She moved to Seattle in 1993 to further her study of fine arts and became independent in 2003.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Seattle Art Museum, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo. She has received grants from numerous institutions including the Pollock Krasner Foundation and Americans for the Arts Funding, and her exhibit NACHI (2003) was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

She is a co-founder of Artists for Japan, a Seattle-based grassroots group to support the relief efforts of the Great East Japan earthquake and aftermath and is a member of NOddIN, a Tokyo-based collective of filmmakers who are paying attention to various social, political, and environmental issues.