(1980 -) Nao Matsunaga is an artist born in Osaka, Japan and lives and works in London. He studied at the University of Brighton (1999 - 2002) on the 'Wood, Metal, Ceramic and Plastic' course, and completed his MA in Ceramic and Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2007. In 2013 he was the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award, and of the Jerwood Makers Open in 2012. He attained a Bursary from the British Council in Indonesia in 2016. Matsunaga has shown nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions; in 2020, he had solo exhibitions in Tokyo and London alongside group exhibitions in both Denmark and Australia.

Working with clay, wood and other materials, Nao Matsunaga makes sculpture imbued with a primal spirit. Its potency derives from a sense of the special, of objects beyond the everyday, charged with power. He is particularly interested in how early man interacted with his surroundings, and the ways in which primitive cultures shared traditions across the world, and how these practices continue to shape our lives. His work aims to explore this idea of universal similarities. Cultural reference points are diverse, reflecting his Anglo-Japanese experience as well as a part-nomadic practice based around international residencies ranging from Arizona to Norway.