Steven Okazaki


Steven Toll Okazaki is an American documentary filmmaker known for his raw, cinéma vérité-style documentaries that frequently show ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. He is Sansei Japanese American and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received a Peabody Award, a Primetime Emmy and has been nominated for four Academy Awards, winning an Oscar for the documentary short subject, .

Career

Steven Okazaki started his career at Churchill Films in 1976, making narrative and documentary shorts. In 1982, he produced ' for WGBH Boston, a documentary short about Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors. In 1985, he received his first Academy Award nomination for Unfinished Business, about three Nisei Japanese Americans who challenged the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in court. In 1987, he wrote and directed the independent film, Living On Tokyo Time, which premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically released by Skouras Pictures.
In 1991, he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for ', about Estelle Ishigo, a Caucasian artist who went with her Japanese American husband to a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans. Steven continued to make documentary films for PBS and later with HBO. In 2006, he received his third Oscar nomination for The Mushroom Club, a personal documentary about his journey to Japan to interview atomic bomb survivors on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Okazaki co-received the 2008 "Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking" Primetime Emmy Award for , and his fourth Oscar nomination in 2009, for the documentary short The Conscience of Nhem En. Okazaki's production company, , is based in Berkeley, California.
Steven Okazaki was also involved as a multi-instrumentalist in a San Francisco punk-rock music group called The Maids, whose sole record, a single called 'Back to Bataan,' gained some notoriety by way of later punk music compilations.

Filmography

Personal life

Okazaki has been married since 1991 to writer Peggy Orenstein. They have a daughter, Daisy Tomoko, born in 2003.