Tamiko and Teruko Nimura are Sansei (third-generation Japanese American) sister artists who often draw on Japanese and Japanese American culture and history in their careers. After reflecting on the influence of Japanese culture in their childhoods, Tamiko will discuss her creative writing and her work on Tacoma’s historic Japantown, and Teruko will share her use of Japanese imagery and folklore in her ceramics, textiles, and installations.
This is their first public presentation together.
Tamiko Nimura is an award-winning Asian American creative nonfiction writer and public historian living in Tacoma, Washington. She writes from an interdisciplinary space at the intersection of her love of literature, grounding in American ethnic studies, inherited wisdom from teachers and activists, and storytelling through history. Her work has appeared in a variety of national and international outlets, including San Francisco Chronicle, Smithsonian Magazine, Off Assignment, Narratively, The Rumpus, SFMOMA Open Space, and Seattle’s International Examiner.
Tamiko’s public history work includes articles on Tacoma’s Japanese American history in HistoryLink.org, a permanent exhibit in California, a digital exhibit on Vashon Japanese American farming history (RevisitWa.org), and an annual Tacoma Japanese American Day of Remembrance in partnership with the Washington State History Museum. She is the lead curator of the digital exhibit, Tacoma Japantown. She is the 2021 recipient of the Tacoma Historical Society’s Murray Morgan Award for notable achievements in researching and preserving local history and the 2025 recipient of the Outstanding Leadership in Historic Preservation award from the City of Tacoma Office of Historic Preservation and Landmarks Commission.
For Tamiko’s creative nonfiction, she was awarded a Tacoma Arts Commission Tacoma Artists Initiative Project grant (2021-22). She also received an AMOCAT Community Engagement Award for her artistic and community work in 2022. She is a statewide 2025 Artist Trust Fellowship award recipient. She is the author of Senator Rosa Franklin’s biography, the co-author of the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration, and the forthcoming memoir A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake (University of Washington Press, 2026).
Teruko Nimura (b. 1978, based in University Place, Washington) creates drawings, sculptures, site specific installations, pottery, public artworks and multi-layered community engagement projects that invite discovery and introspection through experiential connection. Her Japanese and Filipino cultural heritage is a foundational lens for her explorations of collective memory and trauma, identity, motherhood, and the climate crisis. Her work considers the body and its presence within the contextual specifics of the spaces they inhabit. With repetition, multiples, and labor as a gesture of love, she celebrates the flaws and vulnerabilities of objects made by hand. An emphasis on process and a fascination with the felt language of diverse and humble materials resonates throughout her multi-disciplinary practice.
Teruko received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from UT Austin. She has exhibited in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. She was an OX-Bow School of Art Fellow, a mentee artist in the Austin’s LaunchPAD (Public Art Duo) program for emerging public artists, featured in the 2017 TX Biennial, and the New York City Highline’s multi-city exhibition “New Monuments for New Cities”. Since relocating to Washington, she was a Tacoma PARC (Public Art Reaching Community) artist, featured in the 2021 Bellevue Bellwether Arts Festival, the 2023 BIMA Spotlight Juried Exhibition and “Scanning the Room” at Vashon Center for the Arts. She was a nominated artist for Tacoma’s “Artists in the Archives”, a 2023 Rockland Artist Resident, and served as Artist in Residence for Tacoma’s Environmental Services from 2024-25.