Lee Takasugi

Lee Takasugi is a third-generation Japanese-American artist and musician from Los Angeles,CA. Lee began painting and writing music at a very young age.

She received her undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and spent two years in France learning about art history and working as a traveling singer for a small regional orchestra.

Trying to fulfill a family blue-print, Lee went onto law school with the goal of hopefully affecting social change much like members of her family. However, as hard as she tried, it wasn’t the right path for her. She left law school and got a job teaching ESL as she set-out to also explore more deeply what it meant to be committed to one’s art.

With fellow musician Glenn Suravech, Lee formed Visiting Violette, and the two had a long, meaningful run as one of the first Asian American alternative rock bands. They later joined forces with guitarist Shin Kawasaki and contributed music to indie films, theatre productions, KPFK’s “The Global Village,” PBS after school programming, festivals, and socio-political events such as, “Day of Remembrance,” and pilgrimages to Manzanar and Tule Lake. Her song,“On Mars”has been a studied example in the Asian American studies departments at Pomona College, APU and Scripps College of how the WWII Japanese-American Internment camp experience has been expressed through the arts. The Taiko Project, a national touring Japanese drum group recently licensed “Breezeby,” a classic Visiting Violette song that Lee co-wrote with Glenn Suravech. The taiko version of the song will be out in Summer of 2024.

Lee currently lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband and twelve year-old daughter. She worked as a teacher-trainer in arts-integration for Portland State University Cont. Ed until 2019. Inspired by her daughter’s love for painting, Lee opened-up a non-profit arts center geared towards nurturing the creativity of individuals who experience special needs. Little Hands Art Center inevitably closed during the pandemic, and now Lee balances life with the family business, motherhood, disability advocacy, and her own art. She self-published her first children’s book, Jellyfish in 2018, and wrote and recorded the book’s accompanying song. She just finished her second children’s book, which will be on sale beginning in April.