Tsubota, Allie

American, b. 1992

BiographyAllie Tsubota works in photography, video, and text, interspersed with photographs found in archives, to examine the role of images in the formation of historical memory. Through detailed research, Tsubota approaches the erased and altered histories of the Asian and Pacific diaspora in relation to what she has described as a sort of pervasive “racial melancholia” that connects the present to the past through broader ideas of migration, racialization, and assimilation. This concept is explored in her series Dead Letter Room (2021-2022) where she layers her own photographs, National Archive images of World War II images, and an imagined correspondence between her and the enigmatic late poet Hara Tamiki. “There’s no infallible representation of history,” Tsubota said about this project. “Engaging in this fabulation was a way of mimicking, or even mocking, the project of writing history as itself this project of fabrication.”

Allie Tsubota received her BA in Environmental Studies and BFA in Dance from New York University (2014) and MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design (2022). She won the Lenscratch Student Prize in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2022. Tsubota’s work has been featured in exhibits at TILT Institute for Contemporary Image, Philadelphia; Brookline Arts Center, Massachusetts; Microscope Gallery, New York; and various others. She began teaching at Parsons School of Design in 2023.