Katherine Elizabeth Seymour is a photographer, designer and emerging scholar and translator whose work explores questions of representation, identity, and cultural exchange across visual, textual, and material forms. A graduate of the University of Oxford, where she studied Japanese, she works across publishing, exhibition and research-based projects concerned with collaboration, translation, and the circulation of cultural narratives.
In her ongoing work as a photographer and designer, Katherine has spent over ten years working in coproduction with people with learning disabilities and/or autism through community- and young-people-led projects, first as a volunteer and later as an Associate of the rights-based organisation, Changing Our Lives. In alignment with the organisation’s person-centred, coproduced ethos, her work spans portraiture, publication design, and exhibition projects centred on dialogue, individuality, and lived experience. Her practice is shaped by a sustained interest in representation, particularly the absence or simplification of disability within visual culture and public life. Rejecting tokenistic approaches to inclusion, she works closely with disabled people and, where appropriate, their families and support staff, to create images and publications that foreground personality, agency, and everyday experience.
Katherine’s interdisciplinary approach extends into her research and translation practice. Building on her undergraduate studies, in recent years she has independently researched and translated materials relating to the work of Onchi Kōshirō (1891–1955) and the pre-war Creative Prints movement, focusing in particular on the coterie journal Shosō (1935–1944). Her work seeks to explore how artists, writers, and small publishing circles shaped modern Japanese visual and literary culture during the pre-war and wartime Shōwa period, navigating censorship, material scarcity, and the tensions between collaborative experimentation and prevailing ideological pressures.
Across her creative practice and emerging scholarship, Katherine is interested in how ideas and narratives circulate through images, publications, archives, and acts of translation, and in the relationship between material form, cultural memory, and representation. Through publishing, research, translation and curatorial practice, she hopes to develop projects that connect scholarship with wider public-facing cultural engagement.
Katherine Elizabeth Seymour 