Kyoko Takenaka

Kyoko Takenaka (竹中響子) is an anti-disciplinary performance artist, director, filmmaker, butoh dancer, actor, musician, and educator based between Turtle Island and Japan. Working across a variety of mixed media, they use performance, photography, music, and movement to convey emotions and experiences of the in-between. 

Their name, Kyoko (響子), translates to “vibrations of sound child,” a meaning that resonates throughout their practice. Sound, breath, and stillness function not as accompaniment but as structural forces. Drawing from butoh, improvisational music, experimental theatre, and video art, Takenaka constructs immersive environments where the body becomes both instrument and landscape.

Centering diasporic longing and hyphenated identity, their work reflects on cycles found in nature, Japanese mythology, and the ethereal realm. Themes of queer liberation, Afro-Asian solidarity, and spiritual transformation recur across their projects.

Their latest works displayed here were created on Yakushima Island, where Kyoko spent many months healing in nature from an intense chemotherapy treatment. Their debut book, “i’m here & i love you” documents Takenaka’s year navigating a Stage 3B Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis through photography, interviews, and guiding questions. All images and words were created during their treatment and recovery, ranging from portraits taken during their chemotherapy infusion sessions to photographs captured in the forests of Yakushima Island one week after their port removal surgery. This body of work weaves together themes of illness, diaspora, imagination, and healing through nature and community.

Takenaka’s work has been featured on Apple TV+, Hulu, Nowness, HBO, the LA Times, BOMB Magazine, and Far-Near, and performed at Lincoln Center and venues around the world. Their self-directed short film HOME (2021) premiered at the Academy Award and BAFTA qualifying LA Shorts International Film Festival and reached wide circulation online, resonating deeply with Asian American audiences. As a musician, they are guitarist and vocalist of the queer Afro-Asia band WASTEWOMXN and have released collaborative albums including Planet Q and Wastewomxn.

Across mediums, Takenaka creates spacious realms of embodiment—where gesture, memory, sound, and myth dissolve fixed borders, and the body becomes a site of vibration, rupture, and return.