Yoshiko I. Wada

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Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada earned her BFA in textile art in Japan and MFA in painting in the US. She has exhibited widely in the 1970's and 80's including at the Renwick Gallery; Smithsonian Institution; International Miniature Biennale in UK; and the International Textile Fair in Kyoto, Japan. She received the Merit Award at the California Crafts X in Crocker Gallery (1977), Artist-in-Residence at the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia (1983), and the Women in the Arts Award (1987). Her work contains a visual and conceptual pun/statement, and the forms Wada uses range from traditional costume to a virtual space/room installation including lighting. She collaborated with a dancer/performer Shizumi Manale in many performance pieces creating costumes and stage sets, including for the Galadette University Theatre in Washington D.C.

Since the 1980's Wada has been active in textile art research and curatorial field. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Japanese Studies; at the University of California, Berkeley; and has been affiliated with The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Smithsonian Institution; Philadelphia museum of Art; and the National Institute of Design in India. Wada recently co-curated an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington entitled "The Kimono Inspiration: Art and Art to Wear in America" and co-edited and co-authored the accompanying catalogue. She received the Japan Foundation Fellowship in 1979 and 1996. The first research yielded the definitive publication Shibori: the Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing now in it's seventh printing. The second research on the Meisen textiles and women consumers in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan is in progress. Another grant to research tie-dyed textile traditions in India was awarded by the Indo-US Subcommission for Education and Culture in 1983. In 1998 the Matsushita International Foundation awarded her a two year grant to research Pre-Colombian shibori/amarras.

A lecturer at Okinawa Prefecture Fine Arts University she has been teaching internationally for 25 years. She is vice-president of the World Shibori Network, co-chaired the International Shibori Symposium in 1996-97 in India and the ISS 1999 in Chile.