25 Notable alumni of Tama Art University

Yuken Teruya is a Japanese Okinawan visual artist, known for his paper sculptures of plants. He is one of the most representative and most successful artists in a generation of Japanese artists born in the 1970s, who came of age amidst the disasters and economic decline of Japan during the 1990s. He lives in New York City and Berlin.

Erina Matsui is a Japanese contemporary artist. She is known for her surreal self-portraits, mostly done as oil paintings. Her work has been praised for its jarring visual impact as it defies normal representations of childhood being cute and innocent.

Ryūji Miyamoto is a Japanese photographer, best known as the “ruins photographer”. Having studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo, he taught himself photography and began as an architectural journalist for magazines and newspapers. Inspired by the landscapes of post-war Japan that marked his childhood he came to reckon the imagery of destruction when he received a commission...

Takeshi Motomiya is a multidisciplinary Japanese artist living in Barcelona since 1986. Throughout his career, he has worked within various visual arts disciplines that include painting, engraving, and sculpture. Characterized by his work of textures and natural pigment colors, his work is mainly based on abstract art and shows some attributes of figurativism and abstract expressionism, infused with ancient Japanese...

Hidetoshi Nagasawa was a Japanese sculptor and architect, who lived and worked in Italy from 1967 until his death in 2018.

Sayaka Osakabe is a Japanese women's rights activist and politician. She is known for popularizing the term: "matahara" (referring to the act of harassing pregnant employees and forcing them to quit their position at work) and raising awareness in Japan that acts of matahara are illegal. She was a 2015 winner of the US State Department's International Women of Courage...

Kentarō Ōtani is a Japanese film director.

Nobuo Sekine was a Japanese sculptor who resided in both Tokyo, Japan, and Los Angeles, California.

Kishio Suga, is a Japanese sculptor and installation artist currently living in Itō, Shizuoka, Japan.

Yumehito Imanari is a Japanese professional wrestler currently working for CyberFight. He appears on the Ganbare☆Pro-Wrestling (GanPro) brand under his real name, and on the DDT Pro-Wrestling brand as part of the Pheromones stable under the name Yumehito "Fantastic" Imanari (今成"ファンタスティック"夢人, Imanari "Fantasutikku" Yumehito).

Usamaru Furuya is a Japanese manga artist.

Gengoroh Tagame is a pseudonymous Japanese manga artist. He is regarded as the most prolific and influential creator in the gay manga genre. Tagame began contributing manga and prose fiction to Japanese gay men's magazines in the 1980s, after making his debut as a manga artist in the yaoi (male-male romance) manga magazine June while in high school. As a...

Naoto Fukasawa is a Japanese designer, author, and educator, working in the fields of product and furniture design. He is known for his product design work with the Japanese retail company Muji, as well as collaborations with companies such as Herman Miller, Alessi, B&B Italia, Emeco, Magis, realme, and HAY.

Masahiro Ito is a Japanese video game artist best known for his work with Team Silent.

Akemi Takada is a Japanese manga artist and anime character designer born in Tokyo, Japan. Her character-design work is one of the more recognizable styles of the 1980s, when she worked on series like Creamy Mami and Kimagure Orange Road. She is also noted for her long collaboration with director Mamoru Oshii. She graduated from Tama Art University, after which...

Kunio Katō is a Japanese animator known for the short film La Maison en Petits Cubes which won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. He also created The Diary Of Tortov Roddle, a surrealistic dream adventure.

Issey Miyake was a Japanese fashion designer. He was known for his technology-driven clothing designs, notably the Pleats, Please line, exhibitions and fragrances such as L'eau d'Issey.

Ryō Katō is a Japanese actor and tarento. He graduated from the Department of Moving Images and Performing Arts in the Faculty of Art and Communication at Tama Art University. He is represented with Cube.

Naoto Takenaka is a Japanese actor, comedian, singer, and director from Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, affiliated with From First Production. He is married to idol singer and actress Midori Kinouchi. He is also known as the voice of Samuel L. Jackson in the dubbed version of the Avengers film series as Nick Fury.

Mika Ninagawa is a Japanese photographer and director, known for her brightly colored photographs of flowers, goldfish, and landscapes.

Makoto Wada was a Japanese illustrator, essayist, and film director.

Hiroyuki Imaishi is a Japanese anime director, animator and co-founder of Studio Trigger. His style is marked by fast and frantic animation combined with elaborate storyboarding and punchy direction. Prior to founding Trigger, he was an animator and director at Gainax. His most well-known works include Gurren Lagann (2007), Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt (2010), Kill la Kill (2013), Promare...

Yumi Matsutoya, nicknamed Yuming (ユーミン, Yūmin), is a Japanese singer, composer, lyricist and pianist. Generally the writer of both the lyrics and the music in her songs, she is renowned for her idiosyncratic voice and live performances, and is one of the most prominent figures in the history of Japanese popular music.

Koichi Sato is a Japanese actor. He is the son of actor Rentarō Mikuni. He is known for his acting skills and has won three individual Blue Ribbon Awards in the categories of Best Newcomer (1982), Best Actor (2003), and Best Supporting Actor (2024). He is the first actor to win three individual awards since his father, Rentarō Mikuni.