Namiko Kunimoto was Director of Asian American Studies from 2017-2020 and helped create the Center for Ethnic Studies in 2018. She has been the Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies since 2019. Her work focuses on race, gender, and urbanization through art and visual culture. She has written on family photography during the Japanese-Canadian incarceration in “Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian Family Photography, 1939-1945,” on displacement and labour in “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games,” and on the depiction of blackness in Japanese art in The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art. As Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University, she has organized community discussions on bystander training, panels on the incarceration of Japanese-American, Latino/a people, and First Nations peoples at Fort Sil, and workshops on how to take action against racism during COVID-19. 

Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award, and the Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching (2019). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and was the Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum for three years. Her next project, Art, Gender, and Transpacific Erasures, considers the Pacific War and its traumatic afterlives through the lens of contemporary artists in Japan and North America.