Kimiko Tanabe, a mixed-race Japanese-American woman, looks at the camera. She is wearing a blue kimono and her hair is in a braided on top of her head.

Photo by Olga Rabetskaya. Courtesy of Gallim Moving Artist Residency.

 

Kimiko Tanabe is a Brooklyn-based experimental dance artist interpreting Japanese-American history. Her work integrates dance, installation, and design to create surreal performance art that is both joyful and haunting. She works against the “model minority” myth, using art as a space to investigate sites of power with Asian American identity that do not mirror systems of white dominance/violence. For Kimiko, art is intimate and inexact.

Kimiko graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Creative Writing and Dance. Her work has been presented at the Center for Performance Research, Triskelion Arts Center, Colorado College, and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is a MANCC Forward Dialogues Artist in Residence (2024) New Dance Alliance Artist in Residence (2024), Colorado College Crown Family Professorship for Innovation in the Arts Artist in Residence (2023), BAX Space Grant Recipient (2022), Gallim Moving Artist Resident (2022), Artist in Resident at The Floor (2021), and Fresh Ground Pepper Play Ground Play Group Residency Cohort Member (2021).

She currently performs with glenn potter-takata and has performed with marion spencer, Catherine Galasso, Shannon Yu, Kizuna Dance, Seymour::Dance Collective, Lisa Fagan and Hannah Mitchell, HIJACK, Nial Ibragimov, Shawn Womack, Patrizia Herminjard, and Morgaine DeLeonardis.