Yoko Nogami, an interdisciplinary artist, was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She resides both in Letcher County of Eastern Kentucky and Tokyo. She has served as the Visual Art Department Chair at Pinellas County Center for the Arts in Saint Petersburg, Florida for ten years before moving to the Appalachia region of Kentucky as the artistic director and program coordinator for the Culture of Recovery Program at the Appalachian Artisan Center in Hindman, Kentucky. After hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2022, she served as the director of cultural arts and education at Cowan Community Action Group Inc. in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Currently, she engages in a role as an independent artist and cultural arts consultant and liaison, focusing on preservation of old-time music and traditional arts of Appalachia. As a cultural liaison, her passion lies in tying the arts and music culture of Japan and Appalachia, advocating arts education accessibility for all, especially representing marginalized and diverse populations of Kentucky.
Internationally exhibiting artist as her trade, she has been engaged in promoting and programing old-time music as her passion, merging music and visual art into her works. Her work is conceptually driven on issues of cultural displacement, gender, parenthood and identity. Many of her works incorporate a fictional character named "Toko" who is a hybrid of herself and her daughter, Tora. Toko explores, reflects, plays and portrays how the artist views the world around her. As an interdisciplinary artist, she uses diverse media from drawing, painting, photography, performance, video and digital media, choosing ones which align best with her concepts.
Her teaching experiences range as adjunct professor of art at the University of South Florida, University of Tampa, Hillsborough Community College and the Art Institute of Tampa, also as an interdisciplinary artist resident at the Creative Clay (teaching developmentally disabled adults through the Pinellas County School Extended Transitions Program), Youth Arts Corps with at-risk youth and visual art faculty for Interlochen Arts Camp in Interlochen, Michigan.