Corinne Okada Takara is a local artist and arts educator with family roots in Hawaii and Tennessee. Her work is informed by her eleven childhood moves across the country and by anchoring summer visits to the Japanese side of her family on Maui. She fell in love with Japantown San Jose as a home away from home when she first started exploring it as a student in the early 1990’s. Takara works with museums, libraries and after school programs to create art/technology workshops that celebrate culture and creativity to empower community voices in conversations centered on civic spaces, identity, and the future of technology. She has conducted many community pop-up workshops in Japantown over the years and enjoys exploring art as a way to connect neighborhoods. Her public collaborative work explores the use of modern day products to preserve cultural heritage and memory, and honors the colliding and merging stories that arise in rapidly shifting communities. By engaging in creative activities taking shape in public spaces, she believes we can share ideas that impact our world and increase our collective civic engagement. http://www.okadadesign.com/ and https://nestmakerspace.weebly.com/