Osamu James Nakagawa

Osamu James Nakagawa (born 1962) is a Japanese-American photographer. He is known for multiple, cross-cultural series exploring geopolitical landscape, family, memory and personal identity, including his own transnational experience. He initially gained notice as an early digital photographer, however his work has ranged between digital color and black-and-white imagery, and computer-manipulated collage, traditional "straight" photography and large photographic installation. Writers such as curator Anne Wilkes Tucker describe his work as challenging, layered and in a poetic vein, rather than documentary or narrative in nature.

Nakagawa has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the cities of Higashikawa and Sagamihara in Japan, among others. He has exhibited internationally at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Sakima Art Museum in Japan. His work belongs to the public collections of those museums and others, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography and George Eastman Museum. Nakagawa is a professor of photography at Indiana University and lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.