Denise Uyehara is an American performance artist and writer. She is the author of two full-length plays, Hobbies and Hiro. Uyehara is a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council. She is the founding member of the performance group Sacred Naked Nature Girls, a group of four women of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, who use their bodies as a means to construct identities and inspire dialogue. Uyehara’s art examines and explores immigration, race, sexuality, and gender. Her work is internationally recognized. and has been featured in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Helsinki, London, Tokyo, and Vancouver.
Her most recent works include Dreams & Silhouettes/Suenos y siluetas, a multidisciplinary installation piece that uses dancers, actors, and painters to discuss militarization, deportation, and detention in Tucson, Arizona. The piece was performed in 2014. Shooting Columbus also premiered in 2014 and continues to develop. It investigates the consequences and ethics of time travel along with the United States’ continual genocide of its native people. For this piece, Uyehara received the Network of Ensemble Theaters Travel Grant. In 2012, Uyehara presented "Transitions," a project featuring James Luna that discusses cultural authenticity in the United States. Later that year, Uyehara premiered Archipelago, a collaborative piece featuring video artist Adam Cooper-Teran that uses movement, images, and video to emphasize cultural survival and loss, spirituality, and deities in respect to the ancient myths of Okinawa. She collaborated with Sri Susilowati in Pageantry, a performance piece that interrogates the cultural role of Asians in the Americas, in 2008.
Uyehara's first major award was from AT&T: OnStage Productions for Hiro, at East West Players in 1994. In 2011, she was named “Critic's Choice” by L.A. Weekly for her work with The Sacred Naked Nature Girls because she led workshops for artists in different communities including LGBT, women, people of color, and seniors. She was inducted into the Asian Cultural Council in the Spring of 2013 for her work investigating the "migration across borders of identity" for Asian American people.
