Presented at FITC Toronto 2014 on April 27-29, 2014 More info at www.FITC.ca Mistakes, Lessons, and Being Creative with Yuko Shimizu We all make mistakes, Yuko Shimizu has made many. But at least she has learned from it and become a better creative professional. Yuko sat down and made a list of the 20 most important things she learned as a creative professional, which hopefully you can use in your creative career. Yuko Shimizu Illustrator, yukoart.com Yuko Shimizu is an award winning Japanese illustrator based in New York. You may have seen her work on Pepsi cans, Gap and NIKE T-shirts, VISA billboard, Microsoft and Target ads, as well as covers of DC Comics and pages of New York Times, TIME, New Yorker, GQ and Esquire. However, illustration is actually her second career; after studying marketing and advertising in a university in Japan, Yuko got a position in corporate PR in Tokyo, a job she kept for 11 years. After having an early midlife crisis, she made up her mind to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an artist, and moved to New York to study at School of Visual Arts in 1999. She received MFA in illustration in 2003 and has been illustrating since. When she is not in her studio, she is teaching the next generation of artists at her alma mater. In 2009, Newsweek Japan chose Yuko as one of the “100 Japanese People The World Respects”.