BRENDA WONG AOKI
Storyteller • Playwright • Creator • Director • Performer • Producer
For more than 50 years, Brenda Wong Aoki has made original work about one essential human question: Where do we belong?
A San Francisco artist of Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Scottish ancestry, Aoki has created more than 30 original works, produced and presented internationally, crossing theater, storytelling, symphony, opera, contemporary dance, world music, taiko, jazz, ritual, film and interactive installation.
Her work has been presented at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Esplanade Singapore and Adelaide International Festival, Whitney Museum of Art as well as Japan, Austria and the United States. She has been an artist-in-residence at dozens of universities worldwide. She has also maintained a decades-long artistic home at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and was a founding company member of Theater of Yugen and Dell’Arte Players Company.
Her artistic education includes Noh with Living National Treasure Nomura Shiro, Kyogen with Nomura Mansaku, and Gagaku with master Togi Suenobu. Her work brings these Japanese traditions into conversation with African diasporic, Afro-Brazilian, Native American, Hawaiian and contemporary American traditions.
Aoki is cited as the first nationally recognized Asian Pacific storyteller, is a former Governor of the Grammys, a founding faculty member of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and her work is preserved in the Library of Congress American Folklife Collection.
Soul of the City answers that question: We belong because we have survived. We are still here. Our stories, carried across generations, coalesce into the larger story of who and what makes up the soul of a place.