Keith Yamashita

Keith Yamashita is a social-practice artist in Brooklyn, NY who uses conversation as his primary medium to explore shared experience, memory, and collective imagination through poetry, photography, and participatory projects.

Keith Yamashita is a social-impact artist who brings people together to share their hopes, reckon with their pasts, to see each other with new eyes. For three decades he founded and led SYPartners, a transformation consultancy, and established the kyu collective. But in recent years, he made a vow to reclaim his artist self. A poet, photographer, and social-practice artist, Yamashita works through conversation itself as a medium. His art proceeds from the belief that when we share our sufferings, we lesson our pain; when we share our dreams, we imagine a future we can all live in. He is a co-founder of The Institute for Moral Imagination and a trustee of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.