Courtesy of UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design*

Courtesy of Professor Hitoshi Abe

About the Speakers | Theme 1 “Shared Experience”

Reijiro Izumi

Born in 1989 in Kyoto, as the second son of Masakazu Soko Izumi, who was the second son of Genshitsu Sen, 15th Grand Master of the Urasenke Chado Tradition. Graduated from Doshisha University, Kyoto, where he was enrolled in the Department of Commerce, Faculty of Commerce. In March, 2018, completed a postgraduate doctoral course at the Kyoto University of Art and Design, and earned a Ph.D. (doctoral thesis: “Research on Kyoto Kettles of the Early Modern Period: Focusing on Tsuji Yojiro”). Was involved as a part-time curator for Sakai City in the establishment of the Sen no Rikyu Chanoyu Museum at the Sakai Plaza of Rikyu and Akiko.

John R. Graham

John R. Graham is the composer for this year’s Taiga Drama, “Berabou.” He also scored the 2020 Taiga Drama, “Kirin Ga Kuru,” and has worked on other projects in Japan, including Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV for Square Enix. John grew up near the Blue Ridge Mountains and holds degrees from Williams College and Stanford University. He has written scores for over a dozen feature films, video games, television series, documentaries, and trailers for movies and video games. He is represented by Koyo Sonae at Soundtrack Music Associates.

Masaki Nakayama

Masaki Nakayama is Senior Vice President and Head of Sony Innovation Studios (SIS), where he is responsible for overall strategy, business, and operations. He co-founded SIS in 2017, an award-winning technology company under Sony Pictures Entertainment, spearheading virtual production technology and beyond for the Sony group. Masaki started his career at Sony Headquarters in Tokyo in 2000, moved to Singapore in 2002 then Malaysia in 2004. He joined Sony Pictures in 2007, after attending Darden School of Business in University of Virginia. For the last 25 years, his passion is to unite Sony’s technology, products, and service with its entertainment business. He is an avid surfer in Malibu and an active member of the State Bar of California.

Moderator: Michelle Liu Carriger (TFT, UCLA)

Michelle Liu Carriger specializes in the historiography of theater, performance and everyday life, with special focus on gender, race and sexuality, as well as how clothing and fashion can themselves serve as historiographical methods for maintaining bodily links to the past. Formerly a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, her first book project concentrates on clothing and fashion as everyday performance in 19th century Britain and Japan. She attends especially to the ways in which notions of theatricality in clothing and fashion simultaneously articulate and mystify the discourses of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and modernity in their work upon bodies. An article excerpted from this work, “The Unnatural History and Petticoat Mystery of Boulton and Park: A Victorian Sex Scandal and the Theatre Defense,” won the 2012 TDR (The Drama Review) Graduate Student Essay Contest Award and the 2014 Gerald Kahan Prize from ASTR (the American Society for Theatre Research).

About the Speakers | Theme 2 “Place of Experience”

Kunio Kirisako

He was born in Wakayama Prefecture in 1960 and studied under Professor NAKAMURA Masao during his master’s program at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo. He currently serves as Vice Principal of the Kyoto Architectural College and lectures part-time at several universities. His areas of expertise include architectural history and design, tea ceremony culture, and the preservation and adaptive reuse of traditional architecture. He was the first in the field of architecture to receive the Encouragement Award of the Tea Culture Academic Prize for his book Cha no Yu Kūkan no Kindai (The Modernity of the Tea Ceremony Space, Shibunkaku Publishing).

His publications include Chashitsu 33-sen (33 Selected Teahouses, A+U, editor and author), Sekai de Ichiban Yasashii Chashitsu Sekkei (The World’s Easiest Tea Room Design, also available in Traditional and Simplified Chinese), Kindai no Chashitsu to Sukiya (Modern Teahouses and Sukiya Architecture), and co-authored works such as Washitsu Raisan (In Praise of the Japanese Room), Washitsugaku (Japanese Room Studies), Akogare no Sumai to Katachi (Dream Homes and Their Forms), and Chashitsu Roji Daijiten (The Encyclopedia of Tea Rooms and Roji Gardens), among others. He is a licensed First-Class Architect and holds the tea ceremony name Sōhō.

Yusuke Tsugawa

Yusuke Tsugawa, MD, MPH, PhD is Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCLA. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, he was a health specialist at the World Bank group and a research associate at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Tsugawa received his PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University with a concentration in statistics, and his MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. His research focuses on the variation in quality and costs of care across individual physicians and its determinants. Dr. Tsugawa's research has been published in leading medical and health policy journals including JAMA, BMJ, and Lancet. Dr. Tsugawa's research has also been featured in several media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio.

Neil Denari

Denari, FAIA, is principal of NMDA, Neil M. Denari Architects Inc., and a professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. Among his many awards is the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal, received in 2011. His work has been included in many exhibitions, including solo shows “The Artless Drawing” in 2010 at Ace Gallery LA and “Aperiodic City” at T-Space in 2017 in Rhinebeck, NY. His work is permanently held by eight major museums around the world.

With NMDA, Denari works on building projects in North America, Europe and Asia. In 2012, NMDA won first prize in the New Keelung Harbor Service Building competition. Denari lectures worldwide and has been a Visiting Critic at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Rice, and UC Berkeley among other schools and was the Director of SCI-Arc from 1997–2002. He is the author of Interrupted Projections (1996), Gyroscopic Horizons (1999), Chromatopia (2015), Tower_Complex (2017), and MASS X (2018).

Moderator: Michael Osman

Michael Osman’s research in architectural history focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on buildings and cities in the United States. He seeks connections between the infrastructure that undergirds the processes of modernization and the historiography of modernist architecture. The topics of his writing include: the influence of ecological science on theories of city growth, early instruments for remote sensing, and the architectural profession’s relation to modern construction processes. Osman is the author of Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a book on the role buildings have played in developing systems for environmental and economic regulation. He also works on critical problems in modernism’s historiography such as his examination of Reyner Banham’s use of the term “ecology,” an analysis of the metaphysical aspirations latent in twentieth-century writings on concrete, and a co-edited volume Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Osman is one of the founding members of Aggregate: The Architectural History Collaborative, a platform for exploring new methods in architectural history. He co-curated a portion of the exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive” at the Museum of Modern Art. His research has been supported by fellowships from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright Program. He currently directs the Department’s MA and PhD programs.

Co-Presented by

Supported by

Urasenke Tankokai Federation

Parking Information
Please plan to arrive early to allow for parking. Parking is available at Ovation Hollywood (enter from N. Highland Ave.). More details here.