Haikaa Yamamoto

Haikaa Yamamoto is a singer-songwriter and book author. Haikaa was born in Brazil in 1974 but lived and studied in the US and in Japan. She is most noted for being a third-culture singer-songwriter-author who dedicated her work to celebrating the appreciation of cultural diversity.

Career
Based on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, Haikaa decided to find as many lyricists around the world as she could who wanted to write versions of her song Work of Art. Thus, The Work of Art Global Project was born. She started this search in 2009 by asking her friends, i.e., her first degree contacts. With the help of a global team of collaborators, by the middle of 2010 she had already recorded the song herself in 19 languages. Only two versions – Japanese and Italian - were written by people that Haikaa knew before the beginning of the project. The languages are: English, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, as well as the native idioms of South America and North America respectively, Guarani M´Bya and Lushootseed. Haikaa has recorded a video where she sings parts of the song in 19 languages. The project is a work-in-progress and new lyricists from different parts of the world are still joining the team to write new versions of this song which celebrates global cooperation, diversity and self-acceptance. The 20th version, Bulgarian, has been recorded and can be heard on the project's website. In September 2011, Haikaa released her album “Work of Art” with nine original tracks in English.

Book Debut
In June 2012, Haikaa published her first book What is Diversity? where she talks about The Work of Art Global Project as well as key issues in her life such as sexuality, Democracy, Ethics, Beauty and Health from the perspective of Cultural diversity. On this book, she combines a narrative of her own life with thoughts from Socrates to Albert Einstein, from American psychotherapist Alexander Lowen to Persian poet Rumi, from The Bhagavad Gita to the Bible. She also draws on knowledge she encountered in famous Proverbs across cultures.

Discography
Work of Art Album (release September 2011)
 * 1) Work of Art
 * 2) Everything I know about love
 * 3) Call me by my name
 * 4) Happy
 * 5) I'll wait
 * 6) The only reason
 * 7) Vision
 * 8) The Right
 * 9) You and me
 * Produced by Ross Leitner
 * Co-produced by Michael Bradley