Keiko Miyamori

Keiko is a Japanese-American artist who creates visual art installations and gives project-based workshops. Her work encompasses natural materials such as charcoal, mineral pigments, and washi paper, which is handmade from tree fiber. One of her techniques is to create charcoal rubbings of tree bark on washi paper and use them to wrap man-made objects. Keiko aims to engage an audience among communities with limited access to education and travel. She has worked with non-traditional audiences including chronically ill children in hospitals and residents of cities and villages in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Her aim is to encourage people to erase the boundaries of gender, age, race, religion, and country, and restore connections to nature and to each other. Keiko's social change goal is to make her audience feel and respect the connection between individuals and "elsewhere." In IMAGINA, Keiko rescued a tree root from a construction site in North Philadelphia. A number of neighborhood residents and construction workers helped her with the project, and later came to the gallery opening, which was their first visit to an art gallery. For Images of Nature, she hung rubbings outside a gallery in Harlem, attracting neighborhood children to visit the exhibition and inspiring them to make their own art using her materials. In KOKO-TO-SOKO, she used Internet broadcast to create a live jam session between Philadelphia and Ryugasaki, Japan, with the objective of creating connection between two distant places and inspiring people to make a subtle change in their perspective.

Creation of a video to complete an outdoor sculptural installation at Pittsburgh's Society for Contemporary Craft. Support towards editing and post-production expenses.