Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence is a filmmaker hailing from Washington, DC and O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. Raised in a family of activists, critical race theorists, and freedom fighters, she has always been drawn to storytelling as a way to build a new world.

Kimiko is one half of the filmmaking duo FLYPAPER, alongside Megan Trufant Tillman. Their directorial debut, NEWBIES – a lyrical queer Black coming-of-age film starring Mia Isaac, Josiah Cross, and Danny Glover – premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, where it received the Texas Short Competition Special Jury Award. It has been presented at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. NEWBIES is now available on the Criterion Channel in the US and Canada.

FLYPAPER also recently debuted PERMANENT (2025), a short documentary film on the visionary American painter Noah Davis, as part of the traveling exhibition NOAH DAVIS at the Barbican Centre in London, the Hammer Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Their forthcoming short film, THE BIRTHDAY SONG, an intimate rendering of a Black girl’s 13th birthday on the eve of Hurricane Katrina, was selected as a winner of Tribeca Studios’ 2025 Kickstart with Canva Award.

As a TV writer, Kimiko has written for TV shows TWENTIES and BOOMERANG, and developed TV projects at Netflix, Apple, and MRC. She also produced the award-winning short film little trumpet. Her essay "On Being Black and Asian in America" was published in TIME Magazine and featured in the collection My Life: Growing Up Asian in America from MTV Books and Simon & Schuster. Her past work includes the plays Holding: A Queer Black Love Story; Black Magic; and I, Too, Am Harvard (also a viral photo campaign).