Namiko Kunimoto was Director of Asian American Studies from 2017-2020 and co-created 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 essays on family photography during the Japanese-Canadian incarceration in “Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian Family Photography, 1939-1945,” on Cindy Mochizuki’s 2021 work Autumn Strawberry, and on displacement and labor in “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games.” Her first book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, considers the representation of blackness and the construction of gender in post-1945 Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 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, Latinx people, and First Nations peoples at Fort Sil, and events related to the Ethics of Engaged Scholarship. 

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. She was a Greater Arts and Humanities Fellow in 2024. Her forthcoming book, Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2026), considers Japanese Imperialism and its relation to aspirational fascism through the lens of contemporary artists in places such as Japan, Canada, Singapore, and Korea. The book received a FirstGen Scholar’s Grant from the University of California Press.