Junko Emoto "A Play to Watch When You Feel Lonely at Midnight" via Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre

Playwright, director, and actor. Founded the theater company Kegawazoku in 2000. During Emoto’s years with Kegawazoku, she pursued a hyper-theatrical aesthetic centered on the bodies of female performers. Since then, with a diverse range of support, she has sought to create spaces and methods of artistic production that remain independent from market forces. In her recent work “Sexy Driver” (2022) and the film “It Must Be Love” (2024), she explored the boundaries that emerge between theater and film, as well as those between audience and creator, addressing the fluidity of those boundaries. In her directorial debut, "The Extremist's Opera" (2016), she portrayed relationships between women and girlhood, demonstrating that lesbian representation has always been a natural and integral part of her work. Beginning from a resistance to objectified representations of lesbians, her work explores, through the repetition of fiction, the renewal of the lesbian subject and the possibilities that emerge beyond it.

Composer, producer, and DJ. Founder of Foil Records.
Since his student days, yamanaka has been active in the experimental music scene, primarily in Kyoto, and was a founding member of the multimedia performance art collective Dumb Type. He was responsible for music and sound design for productions such as “pleasure life,” “pH,” and “S/N.” He is also the organizer and DJ for the legendary drag queen event “Diamonds Are Forever,” which continues to this day, and has collaborated with artists across a wide range of disciplines.
In recent years, he has participated in numerous international projects, including queer and drag performance works, such as the performance “Procession for Fallen Comrades and Fallen Angels” by Yoshiko Shimada + Bubu de la Madeleine (Venice Biennale 2026) and Ong Keng Sen’s new work “Dido & Aeneas: The Belindas” (DnA Fest 2025, Singapore).

Spatial designer and art director. Founder and director of the spatial design collective GullineL. Recipient of the Jury Recommended Works Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival. Drawing on the mechanisms and provisional energy inherent in theatrical spaces, Minami examines narratives and physicality, expressing distinctive worlds through space and time. Her practice spans and transcends various disciplines, including stage design, contemporary art, retail design, corporate branding, packaging design, and video art. In addition to collaborative projects with artist Kahori Maki, she served as spatial art director for Yuriko Takagi, Kansai Yamamoto, Komatsu Matere Co., Ltd., and Magniflex. She has also done set design for concerts by Akina Nakamori, Koji Tamaki, Momoiro Clover Z, and Shiritsu Ebisu Chugaku, as well as stage design for works by Co.Un Yamada.