Originally from Aomori, Japan, Hiroyo Kaneko has been living for the past seven years in San Francisco. She received her MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. She has been exhibiting her photography since 1999 at such as places as the Photographers’s Gallery and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA.

In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious Santa Fe Prize for Photography. In the accompanying Juror’s statement, Charlotte Cotton, Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wrote: “[...] I needed a little bit of time to become comfortable with the better than formulaic way that Hiroyo Kaneko works and to trust that the ambiguous and unexpected threads that her practice weaves are both interesting and enduring. I appreciate the subtle layers of thought and observation that underpin her practice and I really look forward to seeing how the amazing support that the Santa Fe Prize for Photography offers will impact on her photography.”

Please also see our interview with Hiroyo Kaneko.