Born in Nagano, Kasahara Michiko worked as curator at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and was vice director of the Bridgestone Museum of Art before assuming her current role as director of the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum. She has curated many exhibitions that center a gender perspective, beginning with “Exploring the Unknown Self: Self-Portraits of Contemporary Women (1991), the first art exhibition held in Japan from a feminist perspective. She is the author of books including The Politics Behind the Nude: The Work of Women Photographers (Chikuma Shobo, 1998), Shashin, Jidai ni Ko Suru Mono (“Photography, In Opposition to the Times”; Seikyusha, 2002), and Gender and Photographic Theory, Augmented Edition (Satoyamasha, 2022).