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Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator based in New York City and a veteran instructor at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Newsweek Japan chose Yuko as one of "100 Japanese People The World Respects" in 2009. Her first self-titled monograph was released world-wide in 2011 and her first children's book, Barbed Wire Baseball, published in 2013.

Her work has appeared on t-shirts for The Gap and NIKE, on Pepsi cans, on VISA billboards, and on Microsoft and Target ads, as well as on book covers published by Penguin, Scholastic, DC Comics. Her work has also graced the pages of such publications as The New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and many others.

In fact, illustration is Yuko's second career. Although art has always been her passion, she initially chose a more practical path studying advertising and marketing. Early in her career, she took a job in corporate PR in Tokyo, and she stayed in the industry for 11 years. In 1999, sensing an early midlife crisis, she finally made up her mind to pursue her childhood dream, and she moved to New York to study art for the first time.

Yuko graduated with an MFA from SVA's Illustration as Visual Essay Program in 2003, and she has been illustrating ever since. She now teaches the next generation of young artists in NYC at SVA and online at Skillshare.

(photo by Giorgio Arcelli)