YUKO SHIMIZU (清水裕子) is a multi-award-winning Japanese illustrator based in New York City. Yuko is also an instructor at The School of Visual Arts and has 20+ years of experience illustrating.
Her work includes multiple disciplines; from pages of The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, and The New Yorker to WIRED, and advertising for BBC, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Universal Pictures, SONY, Paramount, MTV, Nike, Hasbro, and Target, to name a few.
Additionally, she has collaborated with the United Nations, Smithsonian Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Library of Congress. Yuko is a two-time winner of the Caldecott Honor, one of the highest awards for picture books, The Cat Man of Aleppo (Penguin, 2020), and Up, Up, Ever Up! (Clarion 2024), Hugo Award nominee (2019, 2020), has won more than 15 medals from the Society of Illustrators since 2004, and was inducted into their Hall of Fame in 2024. Yuko was also chosen as one of the “100 Japanese People the World Respects (世界が尊敬する日本人１００）” by Newsweek Japan in 2009.
Illustration is actually Yuko’s second career. Although art has always been her passion, she had initially chosen a more practical path of studying advertising and marketing and had a career in corporate PR for 11 years before moving to New York to study art for the first time. Yuko graduated with MFA in Illustration from School of Visual Arts in 2003 and teaching there since.
