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Robert Nakamura Home  Directory Robert Nakamura
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Robert Nakamura
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Title: |
Associate Director, Asian American Studies Center; Professor, UCLA Department of Asian American Studies; Independent Filmmaker |
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Type: |
Advisory Board Member |
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| Long Description | |
Robert Akira Nakamura, a pioneering filmmaker and influential teacher and mentor, “the Godfather of Asian American media”, has been a major force in the conception and growth of community media since 1970. Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, has stated, “Bob Nakamura is the standard by which others across the nation –the vast majority of whom he professionally trained—are measured.”
Born on July 6, 1937, in Venice, California, to an Issei father and Nisei mother, Nakamura left a successful career in photojournalism and advertising photography to become one of the first to explore, interpret and present the experiences of Japanese Americans in film. His ground-breaking personal documentary Manzanar (1972) revisited painful childhood memories of incarceration in an American concentration camp during World War II, and it has been selected for major retrospectives on the documentary form at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Film Forum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
A graduate of Art Center College of Design (B.A., 1966) and the UCLA Department of Motion Picture & Television Production (M.F.A., 1975), Nakamura has garnered more than 25 national awards for his innovative and evocative films: Wataridori: Birds of Passage (1975), Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), Fools Dance (1983), Conversations: Before/After the War (1985), Through Our Own Eyes (1992), Moving Memories (1992), Something Strong Within (1994) and Looking Like the Enemy (1995).
In 1970, in order to integrate his professional photography skills with a growing need to express personal and community concerns, he founded Visual Communications, now the oldest community-based media arts center in the United States, where he continues to serve as a member of the Board of Directors. In 1996, he founded the UCLA Center for EthnoCommunications to link ethnic studies and community documentation. In 1997, he and Karen Ishizuka founded the Media Arts Center of the Japanese American National Museum to develop and produce new ways to document, preserve and present the experiences of Americans of Japanese ancestry.
Nakamura was the first recipient of the annual Steve Tatsukawa Memorial Award in 1985 for outstanding achievement and leadership in Asian American media. In 1994, the Asian Pacific American Coalition in Cinema, Theatre & Television of UCLA instituted the “Robert A. Nakamura Award” in his honor to recognize outstanding contributions of other Asian Pacific American visual artists. In 1997, the Smithsonian Institute presented a retrospective of his work, and in 1999 he was named to the endowed chair in Japanese American studies at UCLA. |
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