Spiegel Aihara Workshop is a transdisciplinary design firm, operating at the nexus of architecture, landscape, and urban design. Megumi and Dan believe in the transformative power of good design, in the inextricable relationship between building and context, and in the vital role the built environment plays in the development of community. They view design as a collaborative, research-based process, and work closely with clients to better understand their needs and advance their goals. Current recipients of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

Megumi Aihara, SAW founder, and Landscape Architect, has played a significant role in the design and construction of landscapes of all scales across the United States and beyond. Her work at SAW and her teaching focuses on blurring distinctions between landscape and architecture. She holds an MLA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is a licensed Landscape Architect in California and Hawaii.

SAW founder Dan Spiegel is an architect and educator, leading the SAW’s architectural practice while leading advanced graduate architecture studios at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Dan’s work spans scales and timelines, intertwining the conceptual with practical, using a background in Public Policy to engage design as tool for community engagement and development. Dan was the recipient of the League Prize from the Architectural League of New York in 2018. He holds an MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is a licensed Architect in California and Hawaii.

Spiegel and Aihara will work with an architect Tamotsu Teshima to create an artwork that will study representations of ‘landscapes after the fire’ across cultures in film, literature, and artifacts of the built environment in the United States and Japan, with a focus on the devastation and renewal brought about by fire. The completed work will be exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai.

Speigel Aihara Workshop

J’Sun Howard has presented his works internationally as a Chicago-based dancemaker. He is a 2020 3Arts Awardee, a recipient of their inaugural Esteemed Artist Award from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), and a 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow. A Links Hall Co-MISSION Fellow, a Ragdale Foundation Sybil Shearer Fellow, 2017 3Arts Make A Wave Awardee, and 2014 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist. He has been commissioned by Common Conservatory, Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, World Dance Alliance, and The Art Institute of Chicago. He holds an MFA in Dance and a certificate in World Performance Studies from the University of Michigan.

Howard will work with the music and dance unit Ging Gang Gong to create a dance piece that highlights the stories of dancers from diverse backgrounds in Japan and the United States and fosters empathy and mutual understanding.The dance will be performed in the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai.

Andrea Myers is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on textiles, paper, installation and the space between two and three-dimensionality through abstraction, patterning and saturated color. She received her BFA in Printmedia in 2002 and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies in 2006 both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited widely including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Toledo Museum of Art, Fiber Arts International, the Columbus Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, and the Springfield Art Museum.

She has participated in artist residencies at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, MI, A Studio in the Woods, a program of Tulane University (New Orleans), Fortress Man Textile Symposium (Daugavpils, Latvia), the Textile Art Center (New York City), and in 2018 traveled to Dresden, Germany for two months as part of the Greater Columbus Arts Council artist exchange program. Myers was one of five 2011 Efroymson Fellowship recipients and has also been awarded artist’s grants from the City of Chicago, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Greater Columbus Arts Council.

Myers will work with a textile artist Mariko Kobayashi to create a collaborative art piece focusing on the habitats of endangered bird populations native to Yumeshima; home to around 100 bird populations, including the endangered black-winged stilt and little tern. The completed work will be exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai.

andreamyersartist.com

Katelyn Rebelo is a documentary and experimental filmmaker whose work uses intentionally slow processes such as handcrafted animation, analogue manipulation, and rhythms found in nature to explore personal stories that question systems of power. Her film "Mizuko" was supported by Tribeca Film Institute, and is now streaming on The Criterion Channel. The film was nominated for Best Documentary Short at the IDA Documentary Awards, won Best Documentary Short at Atlanta Film Festival, and received special jury awards at SXSW and IDFA. From 2021 - 2022 she was a Jacob Burns Creative Culture Filmmaking Fellow. Most recently, her film “Through Sunless Ways” premiered at DOCNYC 2023, and “I Don’t Know If You Remember This” screened at Film Diary NYC 2024.

Rebelo will work with a filmmaker Kira Matsubara-Dane to create a filmthat observes the passage of time using an ancient calendar, splitting the solar year into seventy-two distinct micro-seasons. The completed film will be exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai.

katelynrebelo.com

COMING SOON

Robert Hutchison is a practitioner, researcher, and educator whose practice overlaps the fields of architecture and installation. Hutchison received a MArch degree from the University of Washington in 1996, and BS degrees in Engineering from Drexel University in 1990. Hutchison is principal of Seattle-based Robert Hutchison Architecture, and an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. Honors include the 2016 - 2017 Rome Prize in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome, the 2010 Creative Artists Fellowship awarded by the Japan-US Friendship Commission, and a 2009 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of NY.

For his JUSFC Fellowship, in Fall 2021 Robert will visit the towns and villages along the coastal areas of the Tohoku and Kanto regions that were devastated by the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, where he will document the relationship between newly rebuilt communities and recent tsunami infrastructure. This research, which will include documentation using photography, drawing, and interviews with residents, will support his conceptual project 'Memory Landscapes', a series of architectural narratives and corresponding para-fictional proposals that investigate the relationship of infrastructure to coastal communities at risk to tsunamis and sea level rise.

robhutcharch.com

Memory Houses Exhibition

Composer, jazz musician, pianist, remixer and music producer, Mark de Clive-Lowe is an internationally established musician with over 20 years’ experience spanning multiple genres and continents. Half Japanese-half New Zealander and LA based since 2008, de Clive-Lowe has released over a dozen solo albums and hundreds of collaborations and remixes with musicians, DJs and artists around the world. De Clive-Lowe's 2019 double album HERITAGE sees him doing a deep-dive into his Japanese roots, interpreting it through the lens of jazz and electronica. He is the Founding Artist in Residence for La Ceiba Festival, and an active curator, educator and speaker.

(the) avant-garde soulful Pianist/DJ/Producer delivers his lifetime of journeys to different musical ports in a concise package, seamlessly… transporting not just in genre but in emotion and spirit. – Huffington Post

De Clive-Lowe’s late father spent 20 years in Japan from 1953 to 1973, primarily in Hiroshima, Kyoto, and living in Kamakura while working in Tokyo. Before he passed away in 2011, he wrote his memoirs, writing in detail about his years in Japan. De Clive-Lowe will be using his father’s memoirs as his guide, visiting the places where he lived and experienced postwar Japan, reflecting on his father’s experiences, and integrating his own experiences in those places and how he relates as a son and being half-Japanese. From this immersion, he will compose a new body of work “In My Father’s Footsteps,” also collaborating with Japanese musicians.

MdCL.tv

Dakota Gearhart is a transmedia artist whose practice concerns the effects of modern science and technology with a particular focus on the radical deconstruction of contemporary power structures according to an ecofeminist worldview. Her current animated video project, Life Touching Life, invites scientists, researchers, and caretakers to share their observations on consciousness and its relationship to biodiversity. In this series, Gearhart performs as a half-woman half algae creature who introduces viewers to fictional species, like pixel bacteria. Color, humor, sound, and playful spaces of maximalism are common features of her collage-based aesthetic. Her work has been exhibited at The Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, OR; Horse Hospital, London; Horse and Pony Gallery, Berlin; Lab’Attoir, Thessaloniki, Greece; and Taiyuan University, Taiyuan, China. She has been awarded the BRIC Digital Media Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fellowship, and a National Endowments for the Arts US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship which will bring her work to Japan in 2023. She is based in New York City where she is an adjunct professor at The New School and New York University.

dakotagearhart.com

Yona Harvey is a writer and author of the poetry collections You Don’t Have To Go To Mars for Love (Four Way Books) and Hemming the Water (Four Way Books), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda and co-authored with Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther and the Crew. She has also worked with teenagers writing about mental health issues in collaboration with Creative Nonfiction magazine. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she is an associate professor in the University of Pittsburgh Writing Program.

In Japan Harvey will study maps and create concrete and visual poems influenced by the “landscape poems” of poet, performer and Pittsburgh native Joel Dias-Porter. Writing comics has given Harvey more visual design insights as she explores this kind of poetry. Her poems also have an eye on the Pittsburgh Northside neighborhood where she lives. Some poems are like reportages or transcriptions, employing the looseness of notetaking or contour drawing. She is interested in the ways that women mark the landscape with their lineages, shaping the communities of the world, and in pushing the limits of how a poem might appear.

yonaharvey.com

Lee Somers (born 1977, USA) studied art at the Alfred University School of Art and Design (BFA 1999, MFA 2006). Somers spent several years assisting artist Wayne Higby in the studio and developing cultural exchange programs in China. Currently, Lee teaches art at the University of Montevallo in the state of Alabama, USA. His ceramic art contemplates the landscape as a coupling of natural and cultural forces. Collage is a key strategy to his work, layering disparate materials and references in compositions reflecting the experience of time and place. Somers exhibits his work nationally and internationally.

With Echizen as a base, Lee will tour all of the Japan Heritage: Six Ancient Kilns sites, and other ceramic handcraft and industry sites. He will gather materials, techniques and concepts during these site visits, broadening options for creative work while gaining deeper understanding of the local heritage, history and culture associated with the kilns. The end-goal of the residency is to produce a body of work reflective of the experience, synthesizing traditions with contemporary interpretations. He will also produce a monograph documenting the work and its influences, to be published within one year of the residency.

leesomers.com

Scape I