Ayaka Kato is a New York native, Japanese-American photographer who currently resides in New York City. She started photography when she moved to Tokyo in 2009 and continued to develop her color and portraiture style through film and digital mediums. In addition to being a photographer, she is a traveler, translator, climber, and a cat lady. She left Japan at the end of 2017 for a 5-month backpacking trip throughout South East Asia and moved back to New York in 2018.