Miho Tsujii / 辻井美穂
Performance Artist, Educator, Critical Collaborator

Miho conceives, directs and performs solo and collaborative performance, intersecting poetic images, movement, sound/vocalization, verses, story-telling, multilingualism, video and audience interactions. Her works have been presented internationally at arts, theater, educational, and public space, as well as within and with communities surviving catastrophic events. She also presents talks, workshops and teaches at universities, museums, alternative education spaces. Miho runs projects among a collaborative network of socially engaged arts practitioners of diverse genre from every continent around the world.

In her works, Miho involves the audience/participants to experience the greater circulations and platforms of life beyond divided, dislocated, disrupted and hybrid lives. Miho has found that her performance triggers the audience to share their otherwise untold life stories, thereby becomes a vessel for healing. Accordingly, Miho collects, maps and reproduces stories she receives from performing.

Miho's work is primarily concerned with regenerating life at the foot of destructions, creating a seamless line between her art and social intervention. Her works address water, radiation, cross-generational impacts of war, man-made divisions, and all things that impact the urgency of life, based on field research, studies and artistic trainings in ancient, forgotten and withstanding cultural knowledge and practices, rooted in Japan, and offers them through performance, teaching and otherwise to address and inspire contemporary universal agenda.

Miho has worked decade-long with the survivors of war and conflict from around the world. She has experienced Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Tokyo, and was raised in Europe attuned to color lines.

She has presented at Mies van Der Rohe Haus (Berlin), Brooklyn Museum (NY), La MaMa Experimental Theater (NY), New York University (Shanghai), CUNTethics & SQUATconstellation (online feminist intervention, Berlin), Mekong (Vietnamese/Cambodian refugee community, NY), O-Link House (cultural center for tsunami surviving community, Japan among others.

Miho holds M.A. in Arts Politics from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and is trained in figurative arts at Bigakko experimental art dojo in Tokyo. Her works manifest Western backgrounds in education, experimental arts and music.

At the same time, the ancient arts and sacred practices of Japan feed her artistic backbones. Miho is extensively trained in her family tradition of Ikebana flower art, Noh dance and vocals, tea ceremony, and the underlying conceptual systems.

Miho is founder and director of ICAS, an art organization based in Osaka, which offers platforms for experimentations in the arts, through artistic presentations, events, international artist-in-residence, socially engaged arts education, and community building that celebrates diversity. ICAS also runs its own arts projects, including “Waterway” a cultural diplomacy project, which proposes a renewed take on water, as an ecological imperative through performance, visual arts, education and cross-continental collaborations.

MIho is also a resident artist and guest educator at Isso-an, a cultural space and zen monastery in Western Japan, which is surrounded by sustainable life traceable through Stone Age and a site of historic women's heritage marked by one of the oldest largest women's monastery, Korun ancient tombs and sun goddess monument. She is also a founding member of sustainability house project in Miyako Island, Okinawa, where she also researches for her performance works.

Miho was born in Osaka, Japan, raised in Germany/Amsterdam, has studied and worked in U.S. Japan and Europe. She currently resides in Japan. Miho is bi-lingual in English and Japanese, fluent in colloquial German and basic at Spanish. Miho is also a shamanic healer.