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. She was also considered to be an episodic director of AMC’s The Terror Season 2 by Scott Free. Akiko was selected as one of the top rising Asian American filmmakers in 2013.

While she was working for 20 Century FOX as a project manager, she also studied screenwriting and 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).

After working for 20 Century FOX, 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 recently finished the successful festival run for Yae: The Blind Samurai Woman. It was screened in notable film festivals, including Austin Film Festival. She also won the Best Short Film at Downtown Los Angeles Film Festival and Reel Sisters Spirit Award at Oscar qualified Reel Sisters Film Festival. 

Yae: Blind Samurai was released on YouTube, and it received an enormous amount of compliments from audience around the world.  Her co-writer and Akiko also wrote a series pilot and its bible based on the film and currently looking for a showrunner to make it into a TV series.