Kickstarter

  Katie Yamasaki is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She works primarily as a muralist, teaching artist and children’s book author/illustrator. Her work has enabled her to travel and create visual dialogues with children in Cuba, Namibian teens, Japanese auto manufacturers and indigenous women inmates fighting for gender equality and non-violence within the prisons of Chiapas, Mexico.
     Katie’s public projects have explored topics that range from the Japanese Internment to Appalachia’s economic crisis to tribalism among Namibian youth. She has worked on a collaborative mural project with members of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation in Chiapas and recently completed public projects in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn,Detroit, Barcelona and Sevilla, Spain.
     For years, Katie lead a public art program for young women called Voices Her’d (www.groundswellmural.org), where teen girls address critical issues in the form of large-scale public art. She also teaches art to 4th-8th grade students at Ballet Tech, the New York City Public School for Dance.
     Katie earned her Masters of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts and currently has illustrated two published books, Honda: The Boy Who Dreamed of Cars (Lee & Low) and Lifelines: The Black Book of Proverbs (Broadway Books/Random House). She is currently working on 'Fish for Jimmy,' her first published book as both author and illustrator with Holiday House Books.