Ana Iwataki
Biography
Ana Iwataki is a cultural historian, writer, and curator from and based in Los Angeles. She is also a PhD candidate in Comparative Media and Culture at the University of Southern California. At USC, she is on the organizing committee for the Creativity, Theory, Politics research cluster.
Education
- MA Art History, Univ Paris IV Sorbonne, 2014
- BA Art History, Pitzer College, 2011
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
My interdisciplinary research broadly examines the intersection of art, memory, and racial-spatial inequity with a focus on transpacific artists in Los Angeles from the 1970s to the present. My dissertation, entitled “The View from Traction: Japanese American Artistic Practices in Downtown Los Angeles,” centers the Japanese American artists who lived at the former warehouse at 800 Traction Avenue in the Downtown Los Angeles neighborhood now known as the Arts District from the early 1980s to their eviction in 2018. With an interdisciplinary framework, I draw from my long-term involvement with the residents of 800 Traction to argue that their artistic practices, broadly conceived, intervene in dominant narratives shaping the city in material and memory. By interweaving close-reading of artworks and archives with oral histories and participatory ethnography, I articulate 800 Traction as a site from which to perceive and practice heterogeneous negotiations with spatial-cultural regimes.