Cindy Mochizuki

Designer

Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation, drawings and community-engaged projects. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its complex relationships to site-specificity, the transpacific, invisible histories, archives, and memory work. Her artistic process is often research-based and moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, performativity, chance, and improvisation. She has worked extensively on a large body of work that is informed by and within Japanese Canadian communities in B.C and Japan. In these projects she works with members of these communities and often includes her paternal family’s history both within the internment camps and their experiences as repatriated Japanese Canadians in Japan in the post war.

She has exhibited, performed and screened her work in Canada, US, Australia, and Japan. Recent exhibitions include the Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation, Richmond Art Gallery, Frye Art Museum, and Yonago City Museum. She has performed solo multi-media performances as part of 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art and Richmond World Festival with Cinevolution Media Arts Society. She is the recipient of the Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award in New Media and Film (2015) and the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts VIVA Award (2020). She has worked as a scenographer, dramaturge, and created animation design for theatre and dance companies including Theatre Replacement, Dreamwalker Dance Company, Little Onion Puppet Co, Lisa Mariko Gelley, Veronique West, Sophia Wolfe, The Arts Club and Theatre Calgary. Her community-engaged projects include Magic School (Daisen Laboratory, Japan), Things on the Shoreline (Access Artist Run Centre) 2016 and Shako Club (grunt gallery) 2015. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts (2006).