Satoko Motouji was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. Her artistic experience started at age eighteen when she began to study drawing and painting from a professional artist in Kyoto. She moved to the United states to study Art History at the University of Oregon but then decided to seriously pursue being a fine artist. She studies painting and received a M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Currently she is a self-employed artist after being a faculty member in art at Lane Community College in Eugene. In the past, she founded the Siena Art Program from the Department of Art at the University of Oregon in 1996 and was the director of that program until 2005. She was also a visiting instructor in the Kyoto Study Abroad Program which is offered through the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Oregon. She facilitated two painting programs for adults in Italy during the summer of 2018 and 2019. Nature experiences both in the Northwest and in Europe have been powerful artistic sources for her for many years. At the same time, her artistic, cultural and emotional ties to Japan remains solid, and her current artistic inquiry explores Asian artistic and philosophical tradition. In the recent years her major mediums are watercolor and Sumi ink in addition to oil paint.