Corinne Okada Takara

Corinne Takara is a community artist, activist, and STEAM educator creating playful art/science experiences that elevate cultural science knowledge and community voices in conversations about sustainability and biotechnology. Her 15-year career in East San José, Salinas and Hawaii spans game design, public art, and community spaces collaborations. Her approach is informed by play’s power as a facilitator of brainstorming, communion, experimentation, iteration, and dreaming of sustainable futures. Her father, a toy designer, taught her biology through hands-on toy making with natural materials, and storytelling with endemic, invasive, and canoe plants on Maui. On her grandma’s lanai she learned to make pinwheels of hibiscus flowers and boats of bamboo leaves. Listening to family stories of life in a Maui sugarcane labor camp, Takara learned that we know a place through plant names, legends, gifts of health, rituals of gratitude, and play. That deep engagement with biology has inspired her to connect to place and community through food, playful making, cultural knowledge, and agricultural labor issues. Her Ginkgo Bioworks Creative Residency explorations center around community storytelling of biofutures with LEGOs, clay, and natural materials. At Montalvo and SCU, Corinne will continue these conversations through an expansion of the Floating Kīpuka Grow Kit.

Programs:

• Floating Kīpuka /Dreaming the Futures We Want to Grow (SCU)
• A Celebration of Earth Day 2023

• 2023 Marcus Exhibition (Art on the Grounds): Take Time