I was born in Nagano, Japan. At age 3, I started training in classical ballet with my mom who is a ballet teacher using a dresser as a barre in a small living room.

My entire childhood and teenage years were totally focused on my dream to become a ballerina. I got a lot of attention and worked very hard which culminated in winning a major ballet competition and I have had a fortunate career as a dancer since then.

My career started with the Matsuyama Ballet in Tokyo when I was 15, after which I joined the Hamburg Ballet at 17 as a first Japanese dancer and over the next 15 years I went on to work for the Dutch National Ballet and the Rambert Dance Company.

I toured internationally and danced all the major classical ballet repertoires and worked with some of the greatest choreographers of this generation including John Neumeier, Christopher Bruce, Jiri Kylian, Lindsey Kemp, William Forsythe, Hans van Manen, Twyla Tharp and David Dawson.  
 

Over time, I began to move towards dance with a more modern and contemporary sensibility.

In 2003, I joined the project-based company Armitage Gone! Dance as a founding member in NYC and over the next 15 years participated in the collective creation of over a dozen new works as Karole Armitage's lead dancer.

I have also been collaborating closely with New York-based conceptual artist Yoshiko Chuma as a performer and filmmaker since 2014.

In New York, I developed my passion as a film editor and a director and I began making dance and experimental films. I have found that the internal artistic processes I use to create films are similar to my dance sensibility. Although, looking back, I've always been interested in filmmaking. Even when there were no smartphones, no internet, and no DVDs, I remember spending time in the early 90's doing tape--to-tape editing with VHS tapes, and earlier when I was a child cutting film, laminating it, overlapping certain parts, and coloring it with a magic pen. However, in this period my main focus was always to become a ballerina and it took me many decades before I would return to film.

Since the summer of 2019, I have been based in Berlin as a freelancer. I am making a steady transition from being an interpreter to a multimedia performing artist. Even if I can still move and maintain a high level of dancing, a shift has occurred in me in the past years. More and more, I have been thinking about various topics and how to best convey them through the use of different media.

My current format focus is exploring how I can combine my two identities: dancer and filmmaker and see ways to achieve them in the same time and space.

2022 was a big year for me to prove it and led to progress and a boost of confidence. I produced and self-performed two stage productions in Berlin: 
The work "Please Cry" presented  in the fall of 2022, was my first solo performance in Berlin using this hybrid approach.

 

 

I received a Bessie Award (NYC Dance & Performance Awards) in 2004 and was named one of Dance Magazine’s BEST PERFORMERS 2015.

In 2021, my short film "Endless Correspondences" in collaboration with Reiko Yamada was an official selection at Pool 21 International dance Film Festival. 

 

I received scholarships from DIS-TANZ-SOLO 2020 and DIS-TANZ-SOLO 2022 as well as NEUSTART KULTUR in the #TakeHeart | program Research funding in 2023.

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