Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Roger Shimomura Interview
Narrator: Roger Shimomura
Interviewers: Alice Ito (primary); Mayumi Tsutakawa (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: March 18 & 20, 2003
Densho ID: denshovh-sroger-01-0066

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MT: You were gonna mention about your wife, how you happened to get married and what she does and how you support each other's work.

RS: Yeah, her name is Janet Davidson-Hues. And we met when she was a student at the University of Kansas. She was an older person, divorced, that came back to get her master's degree in printmaking. But she ended up taking my performance class and then asked me to be on her thesis committee, which I was. And so I became very familiar with her work, which was all about gender-related issues, and so there was a kind of similarity between what she was doing and what I was doing, and also because she was working thorough a lot of different kinds of processes, except she writes. She has a degree from Columbia, Wake Forest, in literature -- writing, so she writes really well. So she does a lot of different kinds of things. And then she ended up getting a job at Indiana State University, and that's when she and I developed this relationship. We had this commuter relationship, 450 miles apart, and I would either go there or she would come, every month or something. And we ended up getting married. And she moved to, quit her job and moved to Lawrence and has been sort of pinch-hitting at the university whenever they need someone to teach a certain course. She's been teaching it, and so she's been teaching all the year, all year this year. But in the meantime, she has taught herself how to video-edit and has slowly kind of moved away from lot of the painting, sculpture things and moved more towards performance and video. And is right now, we have an apartment in New York and she's there right now working on a performance that she's gonna do in Germany in September. So, she does a lot of sort of "new genre" type projects with friends that she has and performs them around. She organized this group called a.k.a., a group of women, all of whom had graduated from performance class and sort of continued their performance careers afterwards. And what they do is they sort of coalesce in Lawrence to do these performances and they perform at festivals all over the country. They're really good. And they survive these jurying processes and they've performed at New York Fringe Festival, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, they've performed at Mobius, they, you know, at all the top venues in the country. And they're really doing well. So that's what she does.

<End Segment 66> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.