Katsumi Komagata is a Japanese designer and illustrator born in 1953 in Shyazuna. His career began at the Nippon Design Center and continued in the United States where he worked with several design studios in Los Angeles and New York. In 1986 he returned to Tokyo where he opened One Stroke. An award-winning artist, in 1981 he received the Silver Medal of the Art Directors’ Club of New York and in 2006 he won the Tokyo Design Award with his design for the Children’s Hospital in Kyushu, Japan. In Europe, on the occasion of the 1994 exhibition in Villeurbanne, he began a long and fruitful collaboration with Les Trois Ourses, which continues to this day. The partnership focuses on the artistic education of children, both at the Petite Ècole des Trois Ourses in Paris and elsewhere, with workshops and exhibitions. Among his works are the Little Eyes series, small books of visual games to develop the eye and the imagination, and the design of tactile books for blind children. In 2007, Komagata curated the exhibition organised on the occasion of the centenary of Bruno Munari, a master of whom he is considered by many to be the most illustrious pupil, at the Itabashi Museum in Tokyo.
