About Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Diana Lounsbury (born March 12, 1956), better known as Ruth Ozeki, is an American author, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. Her books and films, including the novels My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), seek to integrate personal narrative and social issues, and deal with themes relating to science, technology, environmental politics, race, religion, war and global popular culture. Her novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature. == Early life and education == Ozeki was born on March 12, 1956. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and is the daughter of the American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist scholar Floyd Lounsbury and the linguist Masako Yokoyama. Her father is European-American and her mother is Japanese. In 1980, she graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in English and Asian Studies, and upon graduation, she received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship (Monbukagakusho) to do graduate work at Nara Women's University. == Career == === Film and television === In 1985, Ozeki moved to New York City and began working as an art director and production designer for low-budget horror movies, including Mutant Hunt (1987) and Robot Holocaust (1986). In 1988, she began working for Telecom Staff, a Japanese production company, coordinating, producing and directing documentary-style programs for Japanese TV. During this time, she directed episodes of See the World by Train and co-produced the pilot for the TV documentary miniseries Fishing With John (1991), starring musician John Lurie and director Jim Jarmusch.
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