Mai Ryuno is a socially engaged artist and educator from Fukuoka, Japan, based on the Monterey Peninsula, California. She works at the intersection of art, learning, and community, transforming everyday activities—cooking, eating, meeting, greeting—into opportunities for shared experience, reflection, and creative action.

​

Through teaching, facilitation, and participatory projects, Ryuno designs situations where participants explore ideas, experiment with materials, and express themselves. Emphasizing presence, curiosity, and care over fixed outcomes, her work creates spaces that honor agency, imagination, and dialogue.

​

Her experiences in Tohoku, Japan, following the 2011 earthquake deepened her understanding of collective resilience. Working with youth, she guided them to create videos and public artworks, helping them envision and enact hopeful futures while honoring their voices and initiative.

​

Ryuno holds a BA in English from Doshisha University in Kyoto and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums in California and Japan, and she has taught and facilitated programs through the OECD Tohoku School, Y-PLAN at the UC Berkeley's Center for Cities + Schools, and as adjunct faculty at Monterey Peninsula College and Hartnell College.