ABOUT
Emily Yamamoto is a musician-artist based in Melbourne, Australia, with strong cultural connections to Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Brazil. Her work traverses the media of acrylic paint, watercolour, found poetry, music composition and songwriting to examine the shared ontological need for hope and human connection across temporalities, geographical borders and political systems. Her paintings, often with an unfinished aesthetic where some of the underpainting, mark-making, pencil lines, and the bare canvas remain exposed, explore incomplete constructions of the world through articulating memories, extending reflexive engagement with music-making, and thus relationships and connections with others. The extension of reflexive time provides insights of collaborations and connections past but also demonstrates that process does not end when music has finished sounding.
Emily Yamamoto is a vocalist-composer, music and visual arts educator and artistic researcher. She is a PhD candidate at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, exploring power relations through collaborative artistic praxis and Brazilian popular music. She completed her Masters of Music Performance Teaching at the University of Melbourne, Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Music Performance at Box Hill Institute, and her Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Arts at Monash University. She spent one year studying at Ochanomizu University on the Monbukagakusho Scholarship in 2010.
Born in Hong Kong and raised in Australia, she spent many years living and performing in Japan and Brazil. Her research interests include philosophies of power relations, critical consciousness, Black feminism, Brazilian popular music, artivism and the potential of collaborative arts to promote solidarity with minoritized peoples, critical hope and radical love, in order to foster an equitable society that is rich in diversity.