Nobuko Miyamoto

Singer, songwriter, activist Nobuko Miyamoto uses song, dance and theater to explore ways to reclaim and decolonize our minds, bodies, histories, and communities, seeing the arts as a means of social change and solidarity across cultural borders.

Originally trained as a dancer performing on Broadway and in films, she found her own voice as an activist and singer in the Asian American Movement leading to the co-creation of the iconic album A Grain of Sand (1973, Paredon/Smithsonian Folkways). She went on to establish arts organization Great Leap, creating musicals, concerts, albums, music videos and most recently FandangObon, a festival of art, cultures, earth.

Nobuko’s Smithsonian Folkways album 120,000 Stories, the number of Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII, explores her identity as a Japanese American woman, a life that intertwines the Asian and Black experience, and her concerns about Climate Change. In June 2021, her memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love and Revolution  will be published by University of California Press.