Ana Iwataki is a writer, curator, and PhD candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her transdisciplinary research broadly examines the intersections of art, place, and memory, with a particular interest in the overlapping cultural histories of the Japanese American diaspora and Los Angeles. Her dissertation excavates the histories of the Japanese American artists who lived and worked at the former warehouse at 800 Traction Avenue from the early 1980s to their eviction in 2018. This interdisciplinary project draws from long-term involvement with the residents of 800 Traction, interweaving close-reading of artworks and archives with oral histories and participatory ethnography. By attending to their artistic practices in place, this project seeks to re-calibrate the notions of cultural value and modes of cultural transmission that shape the city in material and memory.

As a curator and community activist deeply rooted in Los Angeles, she extends these critical engagements through collaborative work with artists and community partners. She recently curated the exhibitions Portrait of a Publisher as a Political Project: 30 Years of Kaya Press and Kaya Micro Operas: Alternatives to Archiving (ONE Archives at the USC Libraries), Nancy 2024 (LA Artcore), Itinéraires Fantômes (CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux), and Yoshie Sakai: Grandma Entertainment Franchise (Vincent Price Art Museum). Her writing will appear in forthcoming exhibition catalogues published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. She has also contributed writing to the Los Angeles Times, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zócalo Public Square, Art Journal Open, among other publications. She is the editor of Gene Oishi’s In Search of Hiroshi (Kaya Press, 2023) and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian’s The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022).