Katie Yamasaki is a muralist, community artist, and teacher, as well as an illustrator. Her murals can be seen around Sunset Park, including Feels Like Home: An Immigrant Journey located at P.S. 24 on 4th Avenue and 38th Street.

Fish for Jimmy is the first book she has both written and illustrated. In order to communicate the experience of the Japanese internment camps, Katie combines both representational and abstract images in her illustrations. Katie explains, “Often what we are doing and what we are thinking are not the same thing. I play with scale and time to show the subconscious and conscious imaginings of the main characters.”

The Pintando Postales are large-scale portraits inspired by correspondence between children in Santiago de Cuba and New York City. Katie describes them as “an attempt to illustrate childhood and adolescence from the voice of the child, catching the moment in life where identity, imagination, and expression are at once hugely important, and extremely fluid concepts.”

Katie’s murals are located in diverse communities throughout the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Spain. She teaches art at Ballet Tech, the New York City Public School for Dance, and has illustrated two previous books, one for children and one for adults. Katie earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.