Rika Noguchi was born in 1971 in Tokyo. She received a BFA from Nihon University, where she studied from 1991 to 1994, completing an additional graduate course in 1995. In 1996 she was an artist-in-residence at Hinode-cho in Tokyo, and from 1997 to 1998 she was affiliated with the Asian Cultural Council in New York. Throughout the 1990s, the artist crafted a photographic style based on lyrical images of figures against the sky—as in the Records of Creation (1993–96) and Seeing Birds (1997) series—or underwater, as in her To Dive photographs (1995). In the Dreaming of Babylon series (1998–2000), she photographed urban locations in New York and Brazil. For the New Land series (1999–2000), produced while Noguchi was a fellow at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, she photographed construction sites for manmade islands. The Rocket Hill series (2003) consists of photographs taken at the Tanegashima Space Center. For her recent series, The Sun, initiated in 2005, Noguchi selected the rudimentary pinhole camera to capture the sun’s inconstant and sometimes searing effects on the eyes of its observers here on Earth. Noguchi has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1995, including shows at D’Amelio Terras in New York (2001, 2003, and 2005), Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (2004) and Mongin Art Center in Seoul (2007). She has participated in [sait] site/sight at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (2002), Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003), Time After Time: Asia and Our Moment at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2003), Commonscapes: Photography Today, Views of the Everyday at Miyagi Museum of Art in Sendai, Japan (2004), Brave New Worlds at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2007), and Carnegie International (2008), among others. She received the Grand Prize at New Cosmos of Photography in Kyoto (1996), and the Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists from the Japanese Ministry of Education (2002). She lives and works in Berlin.