2 International Symposium

Tom di Maria has served as Creative Growth Art Center’s Director since 1999. As Director, he has developed partnerships with museums, galleries and international design companies to help bring Creative Growth's artists with disabilities fully into the contemporary art world. He speaks around the world about the Center’s major artists and their relationship to both Outsider Art and contemporary culture. Prior to this position, he served as Assistant Director of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, at UC Berkeley. He holds a B.F.A. from Rochester Institute of Technology and a M.F.A. from Maryland Institute, College of Art. In 2019, he was awarded the Visionary Award by the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

In 1990, she began her career as an independent curator in Chicago, organizing pioneering exhibitions in Art Brut and Outsider Art. In 2000, she established Yukiko Koide Presents in Tokyo. Notable exhibitions include Bill Traylor (The Ginza Art Space, Collection de l’Art Brut, 1992), Art Incognito (Collection de l’Art Brut, 1997), Judith Scott (Shiseido Gallery, 2001), African American Quilts: Women Piecing Memory and Hope (Shiseido Gallery, 2007), and Henry Darger (Laforet Museum Harajuku, 2011). She has edited publications like Outsider Art (Kyuryudo, 2000) and Henry Darger: Living in Unreality (Heibonsha, 2013), Naoyo Fukuda: Works 2001-2013 (2014) and Early Works of Yuichiro Ukai (2023). Her projects explore the roots of human expression transcending traditional divisions of identity.

Born in 1976. M.A. from Keio University. He was a curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) before he was appointed as a director of the Shiga Museum of Art (SMoA) in 2021. He has curated many exhibitions including Francis Bacon (MOMAT, 2013), Logical Emotion: Contemporary Art from Japan (Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, etc., 2014-15), The Voice Between: The Art and Poetry of Yoshimasu Gozo (MOMAT, 2016), The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945 (MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts and MOMAT, 2016-17), Genius: The Human Gift for Creating and Living (SMoA, 2022), and Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Postwar to the Present (Okura Shukokan Museum of Fine Arts, Tokyo, 2023).

Born in 1977. Ouchi graduated from the Department of Arts, Faculty of Letters at Tamagawa University, completed a master's in Art Education at Chiba University, and finished the coursework for a doctoral program in Social and Cultural Sciences. Her research focused on the expression of individuals with disabilities and other social minorities. Ouchi gained experience through internships in community art projects and worked in the cultural affairs department of a local government. Since 2013, she has planned exhibitions of Art Brut at the Warakoh Museum. From 2016, she served as a Program Officer (Social Inclusion) at Arts Council Niigata. In 2018, she joined the Section for Inclusion in the Arts at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and has been in her current position since the summer of 2019.

Yamamoto Hiroki was born in Chiba in 1986. He graduated in Social Science at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, in 2010, and completed his MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), London, in 2013. In 2018, he received a PhD from the University of the Arts London. After working at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, as a research fellow, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a postdoctoral fellow, and Tokyo University of the Arts as an Assistant Professor, he was a Lecturer at Kanazawa College of Art until 2023. His single-authored publications are The History of Contemporary Art: Euro-America, Japan, and Transnational (Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2019) and Art of the Post-Anthropocene (Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha, 2022). He co-edited De-Imperializing Japanese Art History: Art and Legacies of Empire in Modern and Contemporary Japan (co-edited with Nodoka Odawara, Getsuyo-Sha, 2023).