Born 1998 in Tokyo — Lives and works in Berlin
Kaori Yasunaga (b. 1998, Tokyo) is a multidisciplinary Berlin-based artist working across animation, video, and painting. She studied Film, Animation, and Video at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her practice extends into live visual performance, including work presented at Mutek.jp, and she has worked as an animator at Toei Animation in Tokyo.
Her work moves between time-based media and painting, shaped by an early engagement with cinema as an act of concentrating vision. To frame is to exclude, and paradoxically, something comes into presence only through its separation from the world that contains it.
Her films and video installations have been presented in Japan and internationally, including at Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, where she received the Young Perspective Award. More recently, her work has been exhibited in Warsaw.
kaori.yasunaga5180@icloud.comEducation
- 2017–2021Rhode Island School of Design — BFA: Film/Animation/Video
- 2025–Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg — MFA: Time-based Media
Exhibitions / Screenings
- 2021Golden Harvest Film Festival — Official Selection
Indie Shorts Awards Cannes — Official Selection
Toronto Indie Filmmakers Festival — Official Selection
Tokyo Lift Off Film Festival — Official Selection
Tokyo International Short Film Festival — Finalist
Seoul International Short Film Festival — Official Selection
Gojo Animation Gallery, Kyoto — Screening - 2022Tata Bookshop / Gallery, Tokyo — Solo Exhibition «The Pass of No Dreams»
Spiral Independent Creators Festival — Group Exhibition
Spiral Independent Creators Festival — Winners Exhibition
Tokeso, Tokyo — Group Exhibition «ka-ri-tei»
Feb Gallery Tokyo — Group Screening «Dazer in Tokyo» - 2023EASTEAST_, Tokyo — Video Installation
PERSONAL CLUB -Bloodz Boi-, Tokyo — Video Installation, VJ
yoyogiparty.jp — Video Exhibition «1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi» - 2024Void+, Tokyo — Group Exhibition «Media Player»
- 2025No One's Rose, Warsaw — Group Exhibition
Awards / Grants
- 2021Image Forum Festival — Young Perspective Award
- 2022Roma International Short Film Festival — Best Animation
New York Independent Cinema Awards — Best Animation
New Wave Short Film Festival, Germany — Best Animation
Spiral Independent Creators Festival — Shinji Omaki Award - 2025HFBK Freundeskreis-Projektförderung
Experience
- 2021Mutek.jp, Tokyo — VJ, Live Video Performer
- 2022Maison N.H Paris — Creative Direction Assistant
- 2023Toei Animation Studio, Tokyo — Animator
