Umi Ishihara was born in 1993 in Tokyo, and is currently based in London, Tokyo, and Kitakyushu.
Combining social realities with personal memories, Ishihara creates experimental narrative films that record the lived histories of marginalized people and communities. This work is often conducted alongside people from her immediate surroundings, local residents, and other non-professional actors, and weaves together fiction and nonfiction alike. In 2022, she founded the Flatline City art platform to explore new forms of community emerging at the intersection of education, music, and art.
Ishihara’s works have been shown and screened in museums and film festivals worldwide, including the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Fukuoka Art Museum, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), BFI Southbank (London), South London Gallery (London), Foundation Louis Vuitton (Paris), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam), Locarno Film Festival (Locarno), and CPH:DOX (Copenhagen).
Recent major exhibitions include Nocturnal Melody (Gasworks, London, 2026), Thundergod (Gallery Butaiura, Tokyo, 2024), and Gravity and Radiance (Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2021). Major group exhibitions include Visions Programme 2 led by Onyeka Igwe (Nunnery Gallery, London, 2025), Struggle (Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, 2024), Home Sweet Home (The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2023), Coming of Age (Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2022), Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2022 (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, 2022), Bloomberg New Contemporaries (South London Gallery, London, 2019), and Women Imagining Rooms: About the Diary of Lady Sarashina (Ichihara Lakeside Museum, Chiba, 2019).
Ishihara’s works have been acquired by The National Museum of Art, Osaka (Osaka) and Fukuoka Art Museum (Fukuoka). In 2023, she traveled to England with grants from the Pola Art Foundation and the Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation. In 2019, she was commissioned by BBC4 and BFI to create Janitor of Lunacy, which was subsequently aired on the BBC.
In 2016, Ishihara received the Contemporary Art Foundation Teiya Iwabuchi Award. In 2019, she was named as one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and both The Garden Apartment and The Pioneer were simultaneously selected under the Bright Future category at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2021, she was selected for the Shiseido Art Egg program, and in 2024, she was a recipient of GQ’s Global Creativity Awards. In 2026, her work was selected by the Locarno Film Festival Filmmakers Academy and the CHANEL X BIFF Asian Film Academy.