Megumi Shauna Arai

Megumi Shauna Arai is a self-taught, Japanese and Jewish multidisciplinary artist working in photography, performance, and the reinterpretation of craft into a contemporary conceptual context. She grew up living off and on in Seattle and Tokyo with a cultural anthropologist mother and economist father. With a mixed-race and cultural identity, she is drawn to investigating assimilation and resistance, othering and social disconnection in the present day. Her work has been shown in Seattle, Portland, NYC, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles. In 2015, she traveled to Shikoku, Japan for an intensive residency in traditional paper making funded by the Artist Series Grant from local company Prairie Underground and was an Artist in Residence at the Photographic Center Northwest in 2016. Upcoming projects include a show at the Bainbridge Island Art Museum in 2017 and a show at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in 2018.

Megumi received 2017 GAP Award Funding to attend Cow House Studios, an artist residency program set in Wexford, Ireland. The residency offers a valuable support structure for emerging and mid-career artists, committed to creating an inspirational environment for artists to explore and exchange new ideas, facilitating both individual research and interdisciplinary interaction. Financial support from Artist Trust’s GAP Award is covering all expenses for Megumi’s residency at Cow House Studios, including travel, housing, studio space and meals. Her time at the residency will be devoted to creating the website for the project, planning and executing outreach for the piece, and most importantly experimenting and flushing out ideas for the sashiko tapestry she will be creating with the community for the project Unnamed Lake showing at the Wing Luke Museum next year.