Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Performance, Sound, Installation
Website: evaaine.com
Áine E. Nakamura was born and raised between Japan and the United States, an upbringing that shaped a career built around transnational and transcultural storytelling. She earned a BA in Foreign Studies and Curatorial Studies from Sophia (Jochi) University in Tokyo (2004), a BFA in Jazz and Contemporary Music from The New School (2016–2018), and an MA in Composition and Performance from New York University (2018–2020), where she received the Leo Bronstein Homage Award. Alongside her formal education, she trained in Okinawan traditional music (uta-sanshin) under Isamu Goya, Spirituals with Richard Harper, and Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio.
Nakamura’s career gained international recognition in the early 2020s. She held a Fulbright Fellowship in Berlin (2021–2022), studying at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts, and received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Pauline Oliveros New Genre Prize. In 2022 she won the Site-Specific Performance Grant at the Venice Biennale, premiering the solo work Under an Unnamed Flower at the 50th International Theatre Festival, and presented Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains at Theatertreffen, Berliner Festspiele, in Berlin.
She now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Music Department at UC Berkeley, researching a dissertation titled “Fragile Kindness: Performance and the Politics of the Wounded Presence.” In 2025 she was a Commissioned Artist at The Lab in San Francisco, presenting the year-long research project hands on tape, and an Artist-in-Residence at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco.
Nakamura works across sung and spoken voice, movement, storytelling, object-making, and site-specific composition, describing her practice as an “art of voice and body.” Her performances move between the gentle and the grotesque, using masks, real-time voice processing (including RAVE machine-learning software), and traditional and invented vocal techniques to explore belonging, gender, and the boundary between the personal and the universal. Much of her recent work excavates hidden or erased histories — the raw silk trade and the labor of women and silkworms in hands on tape, the aftermath of war and mourning rituals in Under an Unnamed Flower, and animist, nature-based cosmologies in Circle hasu.
Her practice is deliberately interdisciplinary and site-responsive: she treats architecture, public plazas, gallery storefronts, and archives as collaborators, and her installations (plaster wall fragments “mended” with silk bandages, paper screen scraps arranged as moths) extend the themes of her live performances into sculptural and spatial form.
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