In vol. 4 of Born in Ghostland, Ana Iwataki —a curator, writer, translator, and organizer from Los Angeles—shares personal stories about her Japanese and Filipino heritage, speaks about her activist work in Little Tokyo, discusses the anti-racism solidarity lessons to be learnt from Japanese-American incarceration and reparations, and weighs in on the dangers of falling into nostalgic narratives.
Ana Iwataki is a curator, writer, translator, and organizer from and based in Los Angeles. She is the co-editor of X Topics, an imprint of X Artists’ Books. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Media and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her research takes water as a material and metaphor that leads to questions of porosity and fluidity in collaborative relationships, the relationship to land and place in diaspora, or that of infrastructure to the body. As a consultant, she developed an Artist-in-Residence program for the ACLU of Southern California. She is co-founder of the community art and activist organization J-TOWN Action と Solidarity, a member of Sustainable Little Tokyo’s Arts Action Committee, and Vigilant Love’s Steering Committee. Iwataki holds a BA in Art History from Pitzer College and MA in Curatorial Studies from the Sorbonne.
