Karen L. Ishizuka

Karen L. Ishizuka is an independent writer, curator, and documentary producer. She is a third-generation Japanese American and her family was incarcerated during World War II.[1]

Education and career

Ishizuka earned a master's degree in social work from San Diego State University. She began her Ph.D. in the late 1970s but left to do on-the-ground community work focused on Asian American history, culture and community. Over three decades later, Ishizuka went back to school, earning her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles.[2]

She is the author of Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties[3] and Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration. Ishizuka was also the coeditor, alongside Patricia R. Zimmermann, of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories.[4]

Ishizuka has served as a media producer, curator, and director of the Frank H. Watase Media Arts Center at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). She created the Photographic and Moving Image Archive at the Museum. In 2018, Ishizuka was appointed to the position of Chief Curator[2] In 2016, Ishizuka and her partner, veteran filmmaker Robert A. Nakamura, received the inaugural JANM Legacy Award for their contributions to the museum's legacy.[2]

As an advocate for home movies as an important form of documentation for people of color often overlooked by mass media, Ishizuka has produced film installations that feature home movies including Through Our Own Eyes (1992), a three-screen video installation featuring home movies taken by early Issei in America in the 1920s and 1930s,[5] and Something Strong Within (1994), which contained home movies taken by inmates in the World War II camps.

Works
  • Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, Verso 2016
  • Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, University of California Press, 2007
  • Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration, University of Illinois Press 2006
gollark: I mean, not really,
gollark: Pseudobasicode?
gollark: > talks about fancy computer-science stuff> uses some weird horrible BASICy language
gollark: Try what?
gollark: Idea: use linux.

References
  1. "Karen L. Ishizuka". Rewire.News. Retrieved 2020-05-21.
  2. "JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM APPOINTS KAREN ISHIZUKA CHIEF CURATOR | Press Releases | Japanese American National Museum". www.janm.org. Retrieved 2020-05-21.
  3. "Verso". www.versobooks.com. Retrieved 2020-05-21.
  4. Mining the Home Movie.
  5. "Media Arts | Japanese American National Museum". www.janm.org. Retrieved 2020-05-21.
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