Kota Ezawa is best known for his light-boxes, works on paper, and animations that make use of found images, video, and film to comment on contemporary culture, appropriation, and historical events. Long interested in the cultural weight of photography, Ezawa questions the medium’s validity as a mediator of actual events and experiences by reducing complex visual information to its most essential, two-dimensional elements. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the San Francisco Art Institute before getting his MFA from Stanford University. He lives and works in Oakland, California.