Aiko Wakao Austin is a Japanese photographer and translator in New York. Born in Tokyo, she spent her childhood in Italy and studied International Relations at Brown University. Earlier in her career, she worked as a journalist in Japan, and later in finance. She moved to New York in 2016 and began photographing professionally and working as a translator. Reflecting her multicultural upbringing, her personal projects explore the concept of identity, family and culture.
In her latest project, "what we inherit," she provides an artistic exploration of her Japanese heritage. Using images of kimonos and scrapbooks that her grandparents left from the 1930-60s, the photographic montages represent a family’s memories and emotions that we inherit that also fade over time. Her image-making process involves photographing the garments during a tradition called mushiboshi, when the kimonos are aired during the dry months, and are merged with scanned images of archival photographs. The project reflects her pursuit to preserve one's tangible history, and find its place in today's digital culture.
Her work has been selected for the Julia Margaret Cameron Award in 2023 and 2024, and Photoville in New York in 2025.
