Marina Fukushima, born in Tokyo, Japan, is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher based in San Francisco. From a cross-cultural perspective, her creative focus is on the themes of silence, family, and intergenerational relationships. In 2017, she created a multi-disciplinary solo dance "Sky of 11.5 Hours" in response to the video installation exhibition of Dionne Lee (US) and Shirin Abedinirad (Iran) as a part of Aggregate Space Gallery AIR, in Oakland, CA. In the previous year, she presented the multimedia dance performance "Family Seasons" at NOHspace in collaboration with her parents (both visual artists), preceded by the thematically connected works "At Rest" and "Place for Family in Dance" (as a resident artist at Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 in San Francisco). Prior, in collaboration with visual designer Olivia Ting, she created the works "Wrinkle in the Horizon" and "Room in a Pinhole" and was a resident artist at Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei. Her works have been supported by multiple grants from Theatre Bay Area CA$H and the Zellerbach Family Foundation. She received her BFA in Dance from Butler University and MFA in Dance from the University of Iowa. Since 2005, she has performed with numerous dance companies and choreographers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Epiphany Productions, KUNST-STOFF, Lenora Lee Dance, Mark Foehringer Dance Project, ODC, Catharine Galasso, Christine Bonansea, project agora, and Tableau Stations and toured across the United States and internationally in Germany, Greece, Peru, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.
In collaboration with Isak Immanuel / Tableau Stations, she worked on several uniquely composed intergenerational dance performances. Focused on local/global questions of place, family, community, and instability, projects have been researched and presented at Headlands Center for the Arts, NOHspace, CounterPulse, Kinosaki International Art Center, Seoul Dance Center, and TPAM (Tokyo/Yokohama Performing Arts Meeting). In 2018, they collaborated with locals to develop "THINGS EVAPORATE - dances of sickness and health" as artist-in-residents in Beppu, Japan. In 2019, addressing the theme “ending cycles of displacement” as part of Little Tokyo + LAB AIR in partnership with the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, they conducted several somatic and creative workshops and developed the intergenerational performance “FESTIVAL OF SHADOWS - mapping invisible dances”. In early 2020, while in residence at Rogers Art Loft in Las Vegas, they started a new collaborative project "DRY EYES - place after image" shaped from the theme of unstable landscapes and images, the nature of perception, home, and possibility.
