Nakamura Akiko
Born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Akiko Nakamura majored in history and completed a course in curation at Sophia University. Her primary focus was on a comparison of the Japanese mingei and the British Arts and Crafts Movement. After graduation, she spent four years in London, attending an English-language school, doing a short course on interior decoration, then working for three years as an art director’s assistant and producer at stock photo agency Image Source. While working at Image Source, she also took night-school classes in translation, further equipping herself to serve as a cultural broker between Japanese and European creators. After returning to Japan in 2009, she worked as a Web-magazine editor, a writer, and a professional photographer’s representative. Increasingly fascinated by the translation issues involved in all her jobs, she discovered Ruth McCreery and The Word Works while browsing art-related books at a bookstore and searched on line for The Word Works website. She visited The Word Works office and so deeply impressed John and Ruth with her background and initiative that we asked her to join us. Besides her expertise in interior decoration, design, art, crafts, photography, history and travel, she adds to The Word Works capabilities the staff coordination and management skills to handle large museum exhibition and book projects across these and other genres. She is an avid collector of textiles and can often be found on back streets and at flea markets, both inside and outside Japan, looking for additions to her collection.
Book Translation Projects (English to Japanese)
• Victionary (2012). Hands On, Hong Kong: Viction Workshop, Japanese translation published by Graphic-sha, 2012
• Rivers, Charlotte (2012). I Love Stationery, London: RotoVision, Japanese translation published by Graphic-sha, 2012
Museum Catalogue Translations (English to Japanese)
• Artist statements (co-translation) for Architectural Environments for Tomorrow; New Spatial Practice in Architecture and Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, 2011
• Whitehouse, David (2011). gNineteenth-Century Imitations of Glass Made in Ancient Romeh, The Yearning of Venetian Glass, Suntory Museum, Tokyo, 2011
• Forrer, Matthi (2011). gTōshūsai Sharaku, The Man, His Works and Tsutaya Jūsaburōh, Sharaku, Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, 2011
Translation Coordination
• inner voices, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2011
• UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, flick studio eds. (2012). STUDIOPLEX volume 1: Architecture, a timely matter, Tokyo: Sogo Shikaku