Bio
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist and visual artist. She was born in Concepción, Chile, and raised in Santiago, Chile, in a Japanese-Chilean family. She describes her work as conveying the aesthetics of social events, and of places in which individuals share events of an extraordinary nature. Since 1988 she has conducted interdisciplinary art projects, combining anthropological research and visual art, producing artworks that expand the boundaries of visual art and ethnographic representation. Her work has been exhibited in numerous commercial and university galleries in the United States, Chile, and Switzerland. She has received awards from the Ministry of Culture of Chile, Saint John's University, the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, and the California Council for the Humanities. She has been Artist in Residence at Harvard University, California State University at Chico, the Center for Art and Public Life at the California College of the Arts, and the De Young Museum of Art. Her latest major work Geographies of the Imagination was a multimedia installation of nine videos and 23 maps shown at the California College of the Arts in November of 2008.
