Steven Okazaki

Steven Okazaki (born 1952 in Venice, California) is an American filmmaker. He is Sansei Japanese American (3rd generation) and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received a Peabody Award and been nominated for three Academy Awards, winning an Oscar for the documentary short subject, Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo (1990).

[edit] Career

Okazaki started at Churchill Films in 1976, making narrative and documentary shorts. In 1982 he produced Survivors 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 Documentary Short Subject for Days of Waiting, about Estelle Ishigo, a Caucasian artist who went with her Japanese American husband to a World War II concentration camp for Japanese Americans. He 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's production company, Farallon Films, is based in Berkeley, California.