Dane Hiʻipoi Nakama

"At what point do our histories turn into mythology - do our ancestors become characters in stories we tell our children before they go to sleep? At what distance do our homelands become dreamlands? Does our blood begin to speak a different language? Or do our bones turn to milk?"

Dane Hiʻipoi Nakama (b. 1999, Honolulu, Hawai‘i) is a Japanese-Uchinanchu ceramicist, painter, and educator whose work bridges local aesthetics, folklore, and decolonial critique. Raised on O‘ahu and currently based on Tongva land, Nakama’s interdisciplinary practice is both highly referential and disarmingly tender—addressing settler colonialism, ancestral memory, and island identity through a visual lexicon that includes AstroTurf, li hing mui, jalousie windows, sand, seashells and clay geckos. Nakama has exhibited across Hawai‘i and the US continent, and is also the co-founder of the small arts school and ceramic studio known as fishschool Hawai‘i. They received their BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and are currently pursuing an MFA in ceramics at UCLA.