
Yoriko Gillard
PhD
she / him / his
Arts-Based Research
Ma (Liminality) & Japanese Culture
Empathy, Bonds, & Resilience
Relational Sociology
MLED – Modern Languages Education
Biography
Gillard is a Vancouver-based contemporary artist, arts-based researcher, and educator who was born and raised in Japan. Her creative practice and academic research explore the fluid relationships between a person’s past, present, and future, specifically examining how these timelines are shaped by social expectations and cultural responsibilities. As an immigrant living and working in Canada, she is deeply committed to unlearning colonial frameworks and understanding the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism.
Awards & Honours
Japanese Canadian Legacies Fund: Arts Stream. 2024-25. Collaborator: Carolyn Nakagawa. Amount: ($20,000)
Winner of Student Competition 2013: Arts‐Based Conceptions of Water, the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, UBC
Projects
Gillard, Y. (2024). KIZUNA: Praxis of betweenness [Presentation]. Nurturing Learning: What Is, What Was, What Could Be, the Capilano 2024 Teaching and Learning Symposium, BC, Canada.
Gillard, Y. (2023). KIZUNA: Reciprocal growth [Presentation]. Artistic Expression: Embracing the Whole Learner, the Capilano 2023 Teaching and Learning Symposium, BC, Canada.
Creative Works
Nakagawa, C., & Gillard, Y. (2026). Reflect and connect to haiku through your language [Presentation and workshop]. Powell Street Festival, BC, Canada.
Nakagawa, C., & Gillard, Y. (2025). Haiku in Japanese internment camps [Presentation]. Mata Ashita: Japanese Canadian Writing Group, Zoom.
Nakagawa, C., & Gillard, Y. (2025). Reflecting haiku: Reimagining internment-era poetry [Presentation and workshop]. Powell Street Festival, BC, Canada.
Selected Publications
Gillard, Y. (2019). Living with a liminal mind. Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal, 4(1), 31–47. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/atj/vol4/iss1/4
Gillard, Y. (2019). Living practices of ‘ma’. In P. Sameshima, B. White, & A. Sinner (Eds.), MA: Making the curricular in the interval spaces between (pp. 185–195). Peter Lang Publishing. https://philpapers.org/rec/GILLPO-2
Gillard, Y. (2018). Caught in the middle: My liminal space of ‘ma’: 間. In R. Irwin & A. Sinner (Eds.), Visually provoking dissertations in art education (pp. 140–150). Lapland. https://archive.org/details/oapen-20.500.12657-49432/page/140/mode/2up?q=yoriko+gillard
Gillard, Y. (2018). Kizuna: Gather for Nepal. In B. Andrews (Ed.), Perspectives on arts education research in Canada (pp. 77–91). Brill. https://brill.com/display/title/55361
Gillard, Y. (2018). Kizuna: Life as art. In E. Hasebe-Ludt & C. Leggo (Eds.), Canadian curriculum studies: A métissage of inspiration/imagination/interconnection (pp. 233–248). Canadian Scholars. https://canadianscholars.ca/book/canadian-curriculum-studies/