Renee Iijima was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. After studying drawing and printmaking in Southern California and in Tokyo, Japan, she received her BA degree in studio art from Pitzer College in Claremont, California. She returned to the islands and trained in graphic design, illustration, and photography at Honolulu Community College. Since 1987, she has participated in many juried, curated, and invitational exhibitions in Hawaiʻi and in the mainland United States.
In 1996, Renee completed a year of study at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she had begun to combine photographic imagery with mixed media and sculpture. She received a Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts 1996 Individual Artist Fellowship in Photography, and she was featured in the third Biennial of Hawaiʻi Artists held by The Contemporary Museum in 1997. She was then selected for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi’s Japanese American Contemporary Artists 1998 exhibition. In 2000, Renee was given a one-person exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts as the sixth recipient of the Catharine E.B. Cox Award.
In 2003, Renee realized her dream of having a piece in The 8th International Shoebox Sculpture Exhibition, that traveled to the outer islands, the mainland, and to Taiwan and Guam. Renee’s photography and mixed media work were more recently included in three exhibitions in 2018 and 2019, which were curated by Katherine Love, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Renee has served as a visiting artist for classes held at New York University and the San Francisco Art Institute, and she has taught workshops for Leeward Community College and The Contemporary Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts, the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and Wright State University Art Galleries in Dayton, Ohio. She has also been fortunate to have had artwork purchased by many local collectors, who practice and support the arts in Hawaiʻi.