Akiko Sato was born in Japan, spent part of her childhood in Philippines, and in Thailand.  Strong influence is in her work ethic, a legacy from a childhood growing up with grandfather who is a carpenter of traditional Japanese houses.  She studied interior architecture in Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo, Japan.  She moved to Seattle, United States, holds BFA in fine arts, from Cornish College of the Arts. majored in sculpture.  She lived in New York, and currently lives and works in Croatia.
Akiko Sato recently worked in numerous interdisciplinary, multicultural collaborations.  She worked on set and costume designs, with multimedia dance companies such as Gabri Christa and Danzaiza, Troika Ranch, and Tracie Morris, a multi-disciplinary poet and a performer based in NY. Her first tent series “Tent that tells a story”, an installation work was featured in Cork, Ireland in year 2006, as part of “Crossing water and boarders down memory lanes.
The lace tent project was a collaborative project with skillful, traditional lacemakers in Lepoglava, Croatia, in the year 2007.  She used tent metaphorically as a basic unit of home, a portable one.  It comes from her biography of moving, and this time, moving to Croatia as a mother of a Croatian-Japanese child.  
By juxtaposing the element lace, a mandala of women, poems of maternity, Akiko attempted to create a “shelter for the feeling”. The whole process was an experimental interaction of differences in many elements such as cultural back ground, discipline, generation, reinforced by many people’s efforts, ideas and noble devotions.  The finished tent was shown in Gliptoteka HAZU in Zagreb, along with the projection of the process taken every 5 minutes of the whole 35 days of the process.