Rinoi Imada

Rinoi Imada is an interdisciplinary artist whose ideas are inspired by glass, utilizing glass as a material and thinking tools to create her works. Drawn from a curiosity in the rich subtlety of human experience, her practice takes in various sculptural relationships with glass and glass related processes to explore languages that are easily dismissed, ignored and unseen through our lifetime. Imada earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in Glass from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2021. She is currently a craft practitioner fellow at Kanazawa Utatsuyama Kogei Kobo in Kanazawa, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan. She has received awards and residency opportunities from Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and GlazenHuis in Lommel, Belgium in addition to others.

Born in 1995. Rinoi Imada was introduced to glass blowing at the age of 14 at glass art Blue moon, a glass blowing studio in Kawagoe City, Saitama Prefecture. And then took a one-year course and received instruction from Takahisa Kawakami, Kaoru Morisaki, and Kenji Ito at the Aya Glass Studio in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture during her time in Joshibi High School of Art and Design. After graduating from the high school, she moved to the U.S. to study at California State University San Bernardino under the tutelage of Professor Katherine Gray from 2015 until her graduation in 2019, where she also worked as her assistant. 2019-2021, Imada received her M.F.A. from Rochester Institute of Technology. After that, she spent a year working in the U.S. before returning to Japan. Currently, Imada has been chosen as a craft practitioner fellow at Kanazawa Utatsuyama Kogei Kobo in Kanazawa, Ishikawa prefecture in Spring 2024.