Since 1992, when Dr. Abe established Atelier Hitoshi Abe, he has maintained an active international design practice based in Sendai, Japan. As a successful designer and educator who continuously lectures and publishes throughout his career, Abe has earned a position among the leaders in the field of Architecture and urban design for his ability to initiate productive interdisciplinary collaborations and establish professional partnerships with various constituencies. With growing geography in its portfolio, Atelier Hitoshi Abe opened its second office in Los Angeles in 2008. In 2011, together with a group of Japanese Architects, Abe initiated the Arch-Aid network – a voluntary network of architects established to help reconstruct the damaged community by the 2011 East Japan Great Earthquake and Tsunami. In 2017, he opened the xLAB at UCLA, which serves as an international think tank that examines architecture’s elastic boundaries through interdisciplinary collaboration. 

As Director of the Training Center, Uchiyama oversaw the planning, establishment, and implementation of program plans and strategies for the Center. After seventeen years of service with the Garden, which included 14 years as Garden Curator he retired in January 2024 and has since been engaged as a full-time landscape architect through his international design/build practice. Uchiyama is a fourth-generation Japanese gardener from southern Japan, where his family has been involved in gardening for over a century. He is a registered landscape architect in Oregon with a BLA and MLA from the University of Illinois. A recipient of the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from Foreign Ministry of Japan, Uchiyama is devoted to fostering relations between Japanese gardens in Japan and those outside of Japan. He is actively engaged in ongoing public education and discourse, regularly speaking at horticultural societies and garden clubs, while teaching and lecturing on landscape design and construction courses at various colleges and professional conferences across Japan as well the U.S., Canada and U.K. 

Feltens has held positions at MoMA, the National Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, and Gakushuin University and the Nezu Museum, both in Tokyo. He has curated a number of exhibitions, including Japan Modern: Prints in the Age of Photography (2018), Hokusai: Mad About Painting (2019/2020), and Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan (with Yukio Lippit; 2022). His books include Photography of the Heisei Era (with Ayelet Zohar; 2019), Ogata Kōrin: Art in Early Modern Japan (2021), Sesson Shūkei: A Zen Monk-Painter in Medieval Japan (with Yukio Lippit; 2021), and Japan in the Age of Modernization (2023). His most recent book, Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art, Circa 1680-1980, will be released in November 2024.