Joan Shigekawa

Joan Shigekawa is an American film and television producer, cultural grantmaker, and arts administrator. After a distinguished career as a senior executive at the Rockefeller Foundation, she joined the Obama Administration in 2009 as senior deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and served as the agency's acting chairman from 2012-2014. Early life and education As a young child, she and her family were among the roughly 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned by the federal government during World War II. Together with her parents George and Yoshiko and her brother George Jr., she spent roughly 18 months at Tule Lake camp, just south of the Oregon border, turning 6 while in captivity. Shikegawa recalled in an interview, “I remember that we were very cold and that my mother used to go out and try to find scraps of wood, something to keep us warm. While we were in the camp my brother got whooping cough.” In 1958, she received a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College.