(Re)Staging (In)Justice: Performing the Legacy of Japanese-American Incarceration

Panel: Space, Place, and Home: Staging Carceral Spatialities

Featuring Matthew Ozawa (Director), Sam Hamashima (Playwright), and Koji Lau-Ozawa (Scholar)

About the Panelists

Matthew Ozawa is an artistic director, stage director and educator who has firmly cemented himself as one of the preeminent creative forces in the opera world today. Ozawa is a master storyteller, whose “strikingly spare productions” (New York Times) are “a vivid demonstration of what opera is all about” (Opera News). His productions consistently “deliver brilliance on all fronts” (Chicago Tribune) and are filled with “breathtaking imagery” (Broadway World). Ozawa is the Founder and Artistic Director of Mozawa, a Chicago-based incubator advancing collaborative art and artists. Also a proponent of arts education, Ozawa served three years as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. In 2022, he was named the Chief Artistic Administration Officer of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a newly created role that leverages Ozawa’s expertise as both a creative and a leader in the arts.

Described as “serious whimsy” by the Washington Post, Sam Hamashima creates theater with an emphasis on spectacle, surprise, and design. Full-length plays include American Spies (Washington, D.C., The Hub Theatre, Helen Hayes Recommended, Winner of the 2018 Kennedy Center Undergraduate Playwriting Award and the University of Michigan Hopwood Award in Drama, Dennis McIntyre Prize, and The Roy Cowden Fellowship), Supposed Home (TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Seattle Public Theater), Shoyu Tell (Lexington Children’s Theatre), and Thishonor (San Francisco Playhouse). Hamashima is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Musical Theatre Program.

Koji Lau-Ozawa is an historical archaeologist whose research examines the intersecting realms of landscapes, diaspora, material culture, and memory. His dissertation focuses on the archaeology of the Japanese diaspora, examining the material connections and landscapes of Japanese American communities. In particular he has worked in collaboration with the Gila River Indian Community to investigate the site of the WWII Gila River Incarceration Camp. This longterm project combines archaeological, oral historical and archival research in a transnational framework to study the camp landscape and flows of material culture. A second site of investigation looks at the material culture of a pre-WWII urban Japanese American community in Santa Barbara. These research projects are supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, The Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant, as well as the Society for California Archaeology. Before Stanford, he studied at San Francisco State University and the University of Edinburgh. He also worked for eight years in archaeology in the Bay Area for the National Park Service and Stanford Heritage Services.

About the Series

Blokker Research Workshop

The Arts and Justice workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from Joanne Blokker, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.