Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Ceramics, Installation, Painting, Video
Website: instagram.com/reikoyonanstudio
Alexis Reiko Yonan is a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist whose work navigates the intersections of identity, memory, and heritage. A graduate of the Art Practice program at UC Berkeley, Yonan developed her practice through sustained attention to material and process, working across ceramics, installation, painting, and video. Her earliest formative art memory traces back to the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago—an experience that instilled a lasting fascination with scale, narrative, and the intimacy of handcrafted space.
Yonan is also an educator affiliated with Berkeley Art Studio, where she teaches ceramics to the UC Berkeley community and the broader Bay Area public. She approaches the studio as a collaborative environment for experimentation, encouraging students to treat clay as a medium for storytelling—a place where identity, memory, and meaning can take shape through tactile exploration.
Yonan’s practice is rooted in material experimentation and the construction of immersive, layered experiences. Working primarily in ceramics while also incorporating installation, painting, and video, she builds environments and objects that explore how cultural narratives are transmitted, transformed, and embodied. Her work draws on Japanese folklore and heritage: for The Haunt at YBCA (2025), she created a video retelling of the yuki-onna—a female snow spirit from Japanese mythology—embedding myth within a DIY, site-specific installation.
Clay, for Yonan, is not simply a sculptural material but a vehicle for personal and collective memory. Her practice reflects an ongoing interest in how form and narrative interact to create immersive works that invite close attention and emotional resonance.
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