Denise Uyehara is an American

performance artist Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

, director and writer. Her interdisciplinary and solo performances and installations examine and explore memory, time-travel, immigration, race, sexuality, and gender. She is the founding member of the performance group Sacred Naked Nature Girls, a group of four women of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, who use their bodies as a means to construct identities and inspire dialogue. Her work is internationally recognized and has been featured in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Helsinki, London, Tokyo, and Vancouver. She is also the author of two full-length plays, ''Hobbies'' and ''Hiro''. Uyehara is a fellow of the

Asian Cultural Council The Asian Cultural Council (ACC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing international cultural exchange between Asia and the U.S. and between the countries of Asia through the arts. Founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1963, AC ...

Early life

Uyehara was born in 1966 in

Tustin, California Tustin is a city located in Orange County, California, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 2020, Tustin had a population of 80,276. The city is located next to the county seat, Santa Ana, and does not include the unincorporated community ...

to Japanese American parents. She attended the

University of California at Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...

, graduating in 1989 with a BA in comparative literature, continued her education at the

University of California Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

, where she received her M.F.A. in arts.

Recent work

''Shooting Columbus'' premiered in 2017 as part of the Borderlands Theater Season, the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists in the Southwest region. Uyehara was one of five lead artists in the Fifth World Collective that realized the project. ''Shooting Columbus'' investigates the consequences and ethics of

time travel Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a w ...

along with the United States’ continual

genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...

of its native people. The project received support from the MAP Fund and the Network of Ensemble Theaters. Other works include ''Dreams & Silhouettes/Suenos y siluetas'', a multidisciplinary installation piece that uses dancers, actors, and painters to discuss militarization, deportation, and detention in Tucson, Arizona, performed at the Global Justice Center in 2014. Uyehara has also collaborated with Indigenous performance and visual artist

James Luna James Luna (February 9, 1950March 4, 2018) was a Payómkawichum, Ipi, and Mexican-American performance artist, photographer and multimedia installation artist. His work is best known for challenging the ways in which conventional museum exhibiti ...

, which resulted in their live works "Transitions" at L.A.C.E. (2012) and "Ancestral Cartographic Rituals" (2017) at Stanford University, both unpack cultural authenticity, tradition and memory in the United States. ''Archipelago'', a collaborative piece featuring video artist Adam Cooper-Teran emphasize cultural survival and loss, spirituality, and deities in respect to the ancient myths of

Okinawa is a prefecture of Japan. Okinawa Prefecture is the southernmost and westernmost prefecture of Japan, has a population of 1,457,162 (as of 2 February 2020) and a geographic area of 2,281 km2 (880 sq mi). Naha is the capital and largest city ...

. She collaborated with Sri Susilowati in ''Pageantry'', a performance piece that interrogates the cultural role of Asians in the Americas, in 2008.

Major works

''Hobbies'' (1989) ''Hiro'' (1993) ''Headless Turtleneck Relatives'' (1993) ''Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels'' (1994) ''Maps of City and Body'' (1999) ''Big Head'' (2003) ''The Senkotsu (Mis)Translation Project'' (2006-2010) ''Archipelago'' (2012) ''Transitions'' with James Luna (2012) ''Dreams and Silhouettes/Suentos y Siluetas'' (2014) ''Shooting Columbus'' (2017) ''Ancestral Cartographic Rituals'' with James Luna (2017)

Awards and recognition

Uyehara's first major award was from the Brody Arts Fund in 1993, followed by a commission from AT&T: OnStage Productions for ''Hiro'', at East West Players in 1994. Her work has since been supported by the MAP Fund, The Network of Ensemble Theaters, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the National Performance Network, and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Project. Her work has been featured as a Critic's Choice” by ''

L.A. Weekly ''LA Weekly'' is a free weekly alternative newspaper in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1978 by Jay Levin, who served as president and editor until 1991. Voice Media Group sold the paper in late 2017 to Semanal Media LLC, whose paren ...

'' several times, as a solo artist, playwright, and as one of The Sacred Naked Nature Girls. She has led numerous community workshops for artists in different communities including

LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is a ...

, women, people of color, and seniors. She was inducted into the

in the Spring of 2013 for her work investigating the "migration across borders of identity" for Asian American people.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Uyehara, Denise 1966 births Living people American performance artists 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights American women dramatists and playwrights American dramatists and playwrights of Japanese descent University of California, Irvine alumni