Kim Yasuda is a visual artist and professor of spatial studies in the Art Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is co-director of the U.C. Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). The UCIRA serves as a major platform for presenting, discussing and advocating for the arts -centered research across the U.C. system. Its newly expanded mission supports active and engaged scholarship models that work transitively through real-world affiliations and settings outside the conventional studio, gallery, museum or performance contexts.

Most recently, Yasuda has attempted to activate university teaching with her public art research, developing projects that forge partnerships between UCSB and the community. In 2006, Yasuda and her undergraduate art students were awarded a public commission for Villa Cesar Chavez, a 52-unit, seasonal farm-worker housing complex in Oxnard, California. Students designed the public art components, including a plaza, community center and streetscape. Currently, in 2007, yasuda is working with her students to modify used shipping containers, transforming them into mobile art studios.

Yasuda's past installations and public projects investigate links between identity and place within the contemporary urban landscape. She has commissioned projects throughout California, including a subway station and bus shelter facility for the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Los Angeles and permanent commemorative installations for the City of San Jose and Hollywood. She has exhibited her work internationally at institutions including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Camerawork, London; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Connecticut and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston. She is the recipient of visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, US/Japan Foundation, Eliza. M. Howard Foundation, Art Matters, Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation. more >