Ben Kamihira (1925–2004) was an American artist and long-time teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Kamihira and his family were dispatched to an internment camp, and later sent to eastern Oregon to pick sugar beets.
[2] Shortly after graduating from PAFA, Kamihira returned to his alma mater as a faculty member until his retirement in 1980.
During his time in Spain, he painted a Deposition of Christ which won the Pennsylvania Academy's Lippincott Award.
[1] According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Kamihira's artistic style drew on influences as disparate as the Venetian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Veronese, Tintoretto, Guardi—in his focus on landscapes, figural subjects, and religion imagery, as well as European Surrealism of the 1930s in his spatial arrangements, use of illogical viewpoints and interest in texture and dramatic lighting.