Ameya Okamoto b. 2000 is a dynamic 22-year-old whose creative work lives at the intersections of art and social justice. Using accessible materials like wheatpaste, permanent marker, spray paint, and posters from digital artworks, she curates workshops and art actions, creating opportunities for group healing in public spaces through the collaborative processing of violence, memorialization, and generational trauma. Ameya invites viewers to participate in the performance of protest and resistance through art-making. Her personal practice turns the creative lens inward, exploring the artist's core identities through painting and diaristic documentation via their popular social media accounts. Her work has been profiled by Paper Magazine, NPR and Hyperallergic among others. In 2018, Ameya was a YoungArts Finalist in Visual Art and US Presidential Scholar in Art and was included in the NY Post's top 6 rising art stars at Miami Art Basel. She is a 2019 Adobe Creativity Scholar and 2020 Laidlaw Research Fellow. This past summer, as the recipient of a 2022 Project for Peace Grant, Ameya journeyed across the country via Amtrak with the intention of using the country’s geographic landscape and the confinement of train travel to research, memorialize, and reveal the Asian American diaspora's most violent and hidden histories. Ameya is currently researching Asian American visibility and how sociocultural patterns develop into biased lenses. She is the founder and creative director of the social justice arts collective IRRESISTIBLE, creating art for social change.

 

Ameya is a current student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Sociology at Tufts University. She also moonlights as a tooth gem technician and avant-garde nail artist at a salon in downtown Chicago on the weekends.