Aoi Yamada

Aoi Yamada was born in Matsumoto, Nagano, in 2000, and works in Tokyo as a dancer, model and actress. Her movement draws on expressionist dance and on butoh, and that lineage matters, because butoh was never about elegance. It was about the body as something strange and not entirely under control. Watching her, that is exactly what registers. It does not read as skilled execution so much as a body that has decided to say something on its own terms, which is unsettling in the way good performance often is. Technique alone does not produce that effect. Her credits are startling for someone this young. She performed at the closing ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in 2021, appeared in the series First Love in 2022, and turned up in Wim Wenders' Perfect Days in 2023. The Wenders casting is the one that tells you the most. A director with that much of a career behind him does not pick a young Japanese dancer for a film about attention and stillness by accident. She is barely into her mid-twenties, and I genuinely cannot guess where this goes.

Name (English)

Aoi Yamada

Name (Japanese)

アオイヤマダ

Reading

あおいやまだ

Born

June 24, 2000 (age 26)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Dragon

Origin

Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

dancer / model / performance artist / choreographer / actor

• Official sitehttps://www.aoiyamada.com
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/aoiyamada0624/
• Xhttps://x.com/aoiyamada0624
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aoi%20Yamada
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AA%E3%82%A4%E3%83%A4%E3%83%9E%E3%83%80
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q105672772

Tags

• Nagano Prefecture
• dancer
• model
• performance artist

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.