Sakura has been working as a freelance design researcher and curator, most recently contributing to
the exhibition Marcel Breuer’s Furniture at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (MOMAT), on view from March through May 2017. Sakura worked on developing the
conceptual organization of the exhibition. She helped translate WA: The Essence of Japanese Design, published last June, from English to Japanese. Sakura also gave a talk at the symposium Graphic Design Archives: Today & Looking Forward in January.
Sakura entered the MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies (HDCS) program in 2015 after meeting Design Studies director Jilly Traganou at MOMAT, where she was working as an intern. After being encouraged by Traganou to apply to Parsons, Sakura enrolled in HDCS to gain a historical
perspective on art and design.
While in the HDCS program, Sakura took a number of cross-disciplinary courses offered in the Design Studies program, which she credits for giving her the framework to apply design praxis to design history and theory. Sakura worked as a curatorial intern in
the Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design Department of Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, where she conducted research on Japanese posters and contributed articles about the posters to the museum’s website. Sakura says that her intention in highlighting the posters was to affirm the status of graphic design as a topic worthy of serious academic exploration. For her work at Cooper Hewitt Sakura was awarded the 2016 DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion Research Grant for Academic Studies Relating to Graphic Design and Graphic Art.
Sakura also worked as a teaching assistant for HDCS director Sarah Lichtman’s Contemporary Issues in Design course and as a research assistant for Traganou, conducting research on Japanese culture. Sakura’s final project in the program was
a website called “Design History Found in Contemporary Design,” designed to serve as a tool for the exploration of contemporary design issues.
Sakura recently published two articles in issue number 378 of IDEA magazine about picnic posters produced by Herman Miller and a baking book by IKEA. Another article, tentatively titled “Graphic Works by Toshihiro Katayama
for Harvard University,” the research for which she conducted in 2015 through a Parsons Alumni grant, will be published in IDEA this autumn.