A Bit about Me

At seventeen, I was diagnosed with kidney disease. That year, confined to a hospital bed in Japan, I started drawing the foods I couldn't eat because of a diet restriction that eventually led me to explore food as medicine. I didn't know it then, but I was already becoming a food illustrator.

Today I'm based in Sicily, working with food makers across the US, Italy, and Japan to create packaging, labels, and visual identities that make their products look as premium as they actually are. I bring something most designers can't: I live inside the world I illustrate. I shop at local Sicilian markets, sit at the tables of the producers I work with, and move between Japanese, Italian, and Californian food cultures fluently — in every sense of the word.

My work has been carried in 60+ Whole Foods Market and natural food shops, published on the covers of Edible — the James Beard Award-winning culinary magazine — for nearly a decade, and exhibited at Isetan Shinjuku in Tokyo. My clients include the City of Tokyo, the Michelangelo Foundation, Peach John, Pizza Hut Japan, and food and drink producers globally.

If you make something worth sharing at the table, let's make it worth seeing.

→ Get in touch: hello@annatakahashi.com

P.S. I also write. Since 2022, I’ve been a contributing writer to the Homo Faber Guide, introducing extraordinary Japanese artisans to the world. Currently, I’m working on a personal book of illustrated essays about food, Sicily, and what it means to belong somewhere that isn't your home country.