ABOUT
Biography
Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, and installation.
Since 2016, she has studied Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the world-renowned Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Kuramochi translates the poetic choreographic physicality of Butoh and the human body into performance, video, and installation, exploring metamorphosis, transformation, and relationships between human and nonhuman bodies.
Her works have been presented at the Torrance Art Museum, USC Pacific Asia Museum, the Craiova Art Museum, and as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by the Getty. In 2025, she held a large-scale solo video installation at the Japan Foundation Los Angeles. Kuramochi has given artist lectures and Butoh workshops at the New York Film Academy, the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, and art colleges in Tokyo.
She is a recipient of the 2025 AHL Foundation AAPI Woman Artist Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, the NYFA Robert Rauschenberg Grant, the 2024 DCA Empowerment Grant, the 2024 DCA Dance in the City Grant, and the 2022 SCIART Ambassador Fellowship.
Her work and interviews have been featured in BOMB Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, CURATE LA, AUTRE Magazine, and ArtRabbit. In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year on the cover of LA WEEKLY’s PEOPLE 2019 issue, and in 2025, she was named one of the Ten Essential Local Artists in Los Angeles by Los Angeles Magazine.
Artist Statement
My interdisciplinary practice explores the female body through video, performance, and installation. I am interested in how the body moves between different states—human and nonhuman, organic and artificial, self and other.
I explore the body in relation to identity, sexuality, motherhood, grief, and care. The uterus often appears as both a physical and imagined space, holding memory, desire, loss, and connection.
My physical language is influenced by my study of Butoh with Yoshito Ohno and the work of Kazuo Ohno. I use the body as a material for transformation rather than treating Butoh as a fixed style or identity.
Through performance and moving image, I create bodies that become animal, mechanical, maternal, fragmented, or unfamiliar. These transformations allow me to question what makes us human and how we form relationships with other bodies, species, and technologies.