Makoto Fujimura, Visual Artist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Educated bi-culturally between the US and Japan, Fujimura graduated from Bucknell University in 1983, and received an M.F.A. from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music with a Japanese Governmental Scholarship in 1989. His thesis painting was purchased by the university and he was invited to study in the Japanese Painting Doctorate program, a first for an outsider to this prestigious traditional program.

It was during the six and a half years of studying in Japan that Fujimura began to assimilate the combinations of abstract expressionism explored in the US with the traditional Japanese art of Nihonga. Upon his return to the US, he began to exhibit his paintings in New York City, while continuing to show in Tokyo, and was honored in 1992 as the youngest artist ever to have had a piece acquired by Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

Fujimura has become a voice of bi-cultural authority on the nature and cultural assessment of beauty, by both creating it and exploring its forms. His paintings address the creative process and explore what it means to see. The work moves the observer from cognitive categorization to visceral experience. Most recently, Fujimura's work, Gravity and Grace, a collection of paintings formed of carefully stone-ground minerals including azurite, malachite and cinnabar, has been showcased at the Bellas Artes Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. His works can also be seen at Dillon Gallery in Oyster Bay, NY as well as Kristen Frederickson Contemporary Art in New York City.