Born in 1987 in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, Aya Ito is a prominent figure in contemporary Japanese art. She earned her M.F.A. in Painting from the Kyoto City University of Arts in 2011 and expanded her artistic horizons through an exchange program at the Royal College of Art in London. Ito is celebrated for her innovative "Photo-Drawing" technique, a multi-stage process where she constructs elaborate three-dimensional stage sets using sculptures, ready-mades, and paintings, captures them via photography, and finally reinterprets the images back onto large-scale canvases. This methodology allows her to navigate the fluid boundaries between reality and fiction, and between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. Her work, characterized by vibrant palettes, dynamic compositions, and a surreal theatricality, earned her both the Shu Uemura Prize and the Yuko Hasegawa Prize at the 2011 Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi. Ito’s paintings have been exhibited extensively across Asia and Europe, solidifying her reputation as a visionary artist with a unique narrative power.