This panel will take a critical look at Hello Kitty and examine her phenomenon from various perspectives. Moderated by Hello! curator Christine Yano, with Laura Miller, Jaime Scholnick, and Denise Uyehara.Yano will be signing books following the program.

Free for members; free with Hello! admission; $5 general.

If you are purchasing tickets for Hello! and would like to attend this program, please RSVP to rsvp@janm.org or call 213.625.0414.

PANELIST BIOS

Christine Yano, PhD
Christine Yano is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii and co-curator of Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty. She has an MA in Musicology (Ethnomusicology) and Anthropology and a PhD in Anthropology, both from the University of Hawaii. Yano is the author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific; Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways; Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai‘i’s Cherry Blossom Festival; and Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song. During academic year 2014–15, she is Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Laura Miller
Laura Miller is Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. She received her PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988. The author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics and co-editor of three other books, Miller has published widely on Japanese culture and language, on topics that include English loanwords in Japanese, the beauty industry, girls’ slang, self-photography, elevator girls, tarot cards, divination, and the ancient Japanese monarch Himiko. She teaches courses on Japan and linguistic anthropology and works to promote Japan Studies through a variety of campus and community programming.

Jaime Scholnick
Jaime Scholnick is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work deals with gender, power, consumerism, and global domination. She has shown internationally at such venues as MOMA P.S. 1, the Torrance Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson. During a period of living in Japan, Scholnick began a series of multimedia artworks titled Hello Kitty Gets a Mouth. An eponymous short film from the series has been featured at film festivals throughout the United States. Scholnick earned her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 1991 and is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles.

Denise Uyehara
Denise Uyehara is an award-winning performance artist, writer, and playwright whose work has been presented throughout the United States and in London, Vancouver, Helsinki, and Tokyo. For over two decades she used interdisciplinary performance to investigate what marks us in our migrations across borders of identity. She is a recent recipient of grants and awards from the MAP Fund, the National Performance Network Creation Fund, and the Asian Cultural Council. A founding member of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, she conducts workshops for a wide range of communities—artists, LGBTQ, women, people of color—and is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities.