Masami Toku is from the island of Amami Oshima, Japan. She is a Japanese scholar and professor of Art Education at California State University, Chico. She is the director of the USSEA (United States Society for Education through Art) Child Art Exchange program and also the general director of the international touring exhibition projects Girls’ Power! Shojo Manga! (2005 till now) and World of Shojo Manga: Mirrors of Girls’ Desires (2013–2017). She earned a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MA in Art Education/Minor Museum Study and Ed.D./Ph.D. in Art Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Toku’s research interests are cross-cultural study of children’s artistic and aesthetic development in their pictorial worlds and how visual popular culture influences children’s visual literacy. Dr. Toku received the 2008 USSEA International Ziegfeld Award, which is given to the outstanding international scholar in art education in the United States. She also received CSUChico’s Outstanding Teacher’s Award (2010–2011). She works internationally as an educator, publisher, researcher, and speaker. She has published numerous articles, book reviews, book chapters, and books in English and in Japanese. Her recent publications are, Visual Culture and Literacy: Art Appreciation from Multicultural Perspectives (2011 and 2013), International Perspectives on Shojo and Shojo Manga: The Influence of Girl Culture (2015) and an upcoming collaborative research book, Manga!: Visual Pop-culture in ARTS Education (2020).