Hiroshi Teshigahara

He has been called "one of the most acclaimed Japanese directors of all time". Teshigahara is the first person of Asian descent to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, accomplishing this in 1964 for his work on Woman in the Dunes. Apart from being a filmmaker, Teshigahara also practiced other arts, such as calligraphy, pottery, painting, opera and ikebana.

Teshigahara was born in Tokyo, the son of Sōfu Teshigahara, founder and grand master of the Sōgetsu-ryū school of ikebana. He graduated in 1950 from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and began working in documentary film. He directed his first feature film, Pitfall (1962), in collaboration with author Kōbō Abe and musician Toru Takemitsu. The film won the NHK New Director's award, and throughout the 1960s, he continued to collaborate on films with Abe and Takemitsu while simultaneously pursuing his interest in ikebana and sculpture on a professional level. From 1958 to 1971, he served as the director of the Sogetsu Art Center, a pioneering venue for avant-garde art. Many of his friends (Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu, Fusako Shuzui, Genpei Akasegawa, Kiyoshi Awazu) and collaborators from SAC later joined forces to work on his feature films. In 1965, the Teshigahara/Abe film Woman in the Dunes (1964) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the original director's cut of Woman in the Dunes was 147 minutes, he cut it down to 124 minutes when he was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. In 1972, he worked with Japanese researcher and translator John Nathan to make Summer Soldiers, a film set during the Vietnam War about American deserters living on the fringe of Japanese society. From the mid-1970s onwards, he worked less frequently on feature films as he concentrated more on documentaries, exhibitions and the Sogetsu School and became grand master of the school in 1980. In 1980, after the death of his father, Teshigahara became the third generation Iemoto of Sogetsu School, using bamboo at his large-scale solo exhibitions at several well known museums, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea (1989), Palazzo Reale in Milan, Italy (1995), and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (1996), among other venues. In Japan, Teshigahara displayed his art installations nationwide, including Gen-Ichiro Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art in Marugame and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. In the 1990s, he pushed the art form of renka, which is a series of impromptu Ikebana arranged by multiple artists. Teshigahara was also involved in ceramics calligraphy and installation art. Throughout his career, Teshigahara also involved himself in stage and art direction, both domestically and internationally. He has directed performances such as the opera Turandot (Lyon, France, 1992; Geneva, Switzerland, 1996), and original Noh play Susanoh (the Avignon Theatre Festival, 1994), Sloka by Chandralekha Dance Company (1999), and original outdoor dance play Susano Iden (1991).

In 1983, Teshigahara created a permanent installation at the Ken Domon Museum, Sakata, Japan. Teshigahara designed the Ayatori Bridge, a pink modern bridge that connects to the Yamanaka Onsen in Kaga, Ishikawa Prefecture.