In the vanguard of performance art, Brenda Wong Aoki is an artist whose work transcends traditional boundaries, combining music, dance, and spoken word. Aoki is America’s first nationally recognized Asian Pacific storyteller. Her work explores themes of home, personal experience, and belonging, blending East & West by incorporating Japanese traditional theater with multimedia and live music, and spanning solo performance, symphony, jazz ensemble, and interactive performance with installation art.

She collaborated with artists such as her late husband, composer Mark Izu, and maestro Kent Nagano, Gagaku master Togi Suenobu, and created site-specific dance pieces for Jefferson Starship and Paul Kantner. She co-founded First Voice in 1997 with Izu to create and produce intercultural performance works and was a founding faculty member at Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

Born into an activist family—her grandfather founded America’s first Japantown and her grandmother co-founded the first Chinatown Ladies Garment Union—Aoki's artistic journey is deeply tied to social responsibility and cultural pride.