is a Japanese printmaker and performance artist who has been referred to as "Japan’s premier feminist and antiwar artist." Shimada has been exploring issues of gender, power, history, and nation in her artwork since the late 1980s, situating her artwork within her own complex socio-political context of being Asian, Japanese, and a woman. Her works have been exhibited expansively, both within Japan and internationally. Shimada has curated art exhibitions in Japan and abroad, and she lectures on Japanese art, politics, and feminism at the University of Tokyo. Biography Shimada was born and raised in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, near the U.S. Air Force Base where her father worked during the height of the US's military involvement in Southeast Asia. Growing up near the base, which was formerly used by the Japanese Imperial Army, exposed Shimada to US-Japan postwar tensions from a young age during the tumultuous 1960s. Shimada attended university in the U.S., graduating in 1982 with a BA in Fine Art from Scripps College in Claremont, California, before returning to Japan to study etching under Mono-ha artist Yoshida Katsurō at the alternative art school Biggakō in Tokyo. Shimada also spent time living in Berlin and New York City and is comfortable with both the German and English language, which has aided her in building a transnational platform for her body of work. In 2015, she received her PhD from Kingston University, London. Career Shimada’s oeuvre engages with the way that wartime history has been preserved and perpetuated in attitudes and cultural memory in present-day Japanese society, with particular interest in the role of women in World War II as both aggressors and victims. She claims that her aim is not simply to point fingers at the accused, but rather to explore how structures of imperialism are implicated in both the past and present. In the artist’s own words, “there is no clear borderline between the oppressors and the oppressed anymore.” Shimada's works are held by the New York Public Library, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Keio University Art Center, Kyoto Seika University, and City University of New York. Shimada participated in the MoMA PS1 Studio Program in 1998-1999. Her work is included in the Asian American Arts Centre's professional digital archive of Asian and Asian American contemporary visual artists. 'Past Imperfect' Series (early 1990s) Shimada moved to Berlin after graduating from university in the U.S., where she observed artists engaging with