Her latest film, “Yae: The Blind Samurai Woman,” was screened in notable film festivals, including the Austin Film Festival. She also won the Best Short Film at the Downtown Los Angeles Film Festival and the Reel Sisters Spirit Award at the Oscar-qualified Reel Sisters Film Festival. “Yae: Blind Samurai” was released on YouTube and had over 560,000 views, and it received an enormous amount of compliments from audiences worldwide. Her co-writer and Akiko also wrote a series pilot and its bible based on the film and its series bible. 

Akiko was a finalist of the Women of Color Commercial Directing Program (Top 10 out of 100+) in 2020, a semi-finalist of NBC Female Forward (Top 20 out of 1000) in 2018, Sony Directors Program (Top 25 out of 250) in 2017, and 2019, and ABC Director’s Program in 2014. Akiko was selected as one of the top rising Asian American filmmakers in 2013.

Akiko also studied screenwriting and was taught man-to-man by Monte Merrick (Writer of Mr. Baseball and Memphis Belle) and Jonathan Tsuneishi (A script analyst at 20 Century Fox.) She is an active member of the Santa Monica Screenwriting Group to exchange notes with Nicole Perlman (Writer of Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy), Ben Kim (Writer of Queen Sugar), and James ‘Doc’ Mason (Writer of The Cage).

During the pandemic, she became a set production assistant in Bullet Train, where she also worked as a set Japanese consultant to advise a stunt coordinator, a set decoration department, and prop masters. She also helped Michael Shannon and Andrew Koji with the Japanese dialect. 

Akiko also works as an English dubbing Supervising Producer for popular animes including Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.