Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician whose studio practice negotiates formal, material and cultural narratives within archival histories and the mundane. Her work balances research and process-based methodologies create, expand and respond to physical and ephemeral archives. ​Aoki's foundations are as analogue photographer and filmmaker, and in her practice the vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema operate as both technical and philosophical frameworks for the image plane. The work suggests an attentiveness to the body in space, where the body also serves as an an inflection point oscillating between assertions of anecdotal, historical and communal narratives.

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Aoki descends from a traditional performing arts family with roots dating back to the Edo period in Japan. She is the fifth generation of the Toyoakimoto family which ran an okiya (geisha house) in central Tokyo and specialized in providing live musical accompaniment for the dancers. On professional stages from age 7, Aoki continues this unique family legacy as Toyoaki Chitose (豊秋千東勢) in Chicago. Learning from and playing with her father Tatsu Aoki (Toyoaki Sanjuro), Aoki has built this traditional foundation in a contemporary musical practice, performing in contemporary and traditional contexts on shamisen, taiko and tsuzumi. Her playing is informed by the Japanese aesthetics of ma and emphasizes the melodic phrasing of space and choreography to reorient the notion of percussion as mere rhythm. Stoic, durational explorations elicit soundscapes that project organic textures of live performance and sonic nuances of cyclical, droning sustain. Aoki balances the artistic and aesthetic integrity of traditional Japanese music with a contemporary sensibility, bringing taiko to contemporary artistic ecologies of music, sound and performance to push her practice beyond measures of cultural preservation. Her solo albums retain the "liveness" of live performance while working through and expanding upon minimal phrasing. Her solo performance series K.A. elongates choreographic sound in a continuous, concert length set as visual and sonic durée. 

She has performed and exhibited at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Mono no Aware, New York; the Chicago Cultural Center; The Lab, San Francisco; and the Barbican Centre, London; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago;  Heritage Museum of Asian Art, Chicago; 6018|North, Chicago; and Gallery Kobo Chika, Tokyo, Japan; among others. She was held residencies at Light Work, International Museum of Surgical Science and HATCH Projects at Chicago Artists Coalition. 
Musical projects include solo and collaborative albums released by Asian Improv Records and FPE Records, most recently on an album with jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita; the Yoko Ono produced SKYLANDING album project; Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, Experimental Sound Studio’s Sonic Pavilion Festival, and the Soundtrack series at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. Aoki leads Tsukasa Taiko, a program of Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW); and is also program curator at AIRMW. ​