Estelle Ishigo (July 15, 1899 – February 25, 1990), née Peck, was an American artist known for her watercolors, pencil and charcoal drawings, and sketches.

She subsequently wrote about her experiences in Lone Heart Mountain and was the subject of the Oscar winning documentary Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo.

[4] At the age of four, she showed promising talent in both painting and singing, and started learning the violin by the time she was twelve.

Later on, Peck decided to become a painter and enrolled in the Otis Art Institute, where she met San Franciscan Nisei Arthur Ishigo (1902–1957).

[4][6] The couple lived in the Japanese American community of Los Angeles, and were avid campers – finding refuge from racial prejudice in nature.

Arthur Ishigo and all other ethnic Japanese who worked at Paramount Studios were fired on December 8, 1941, one day after the attack.

Ishigo later wrote, "Strange as it may sound, in this desperate and lonely place, I felt accepted for the first time in my life.

"[12] She chose charcoal sketches and pencil drawings as her main media because she found watercolors to be "too clean and untroubled" to capture the experiences of camp.

[12] Estelle took a job in the Documentary Section of the Reports Division for Heart Mountain and was paid $19 a month for her work (the maximum wage available for prisoners).

[1] When the trailer camps were condemned by the Los Angeles Health Department in the Spring of 1948, Japanese American families moved into housing projects.

[16] In 1948, as part of the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act the Ishigos submitted a list of their lost property, totaling over $1,000.

[15] In 1983, documentary filmmakers and former Heart Mountain prisoners tracked down Estelle living in a basement apartment in Los Angeles.

[21] After the Eaton collection was narrowly saved from a private sale in 2015 and acquired by the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Ishigo's watercolors were conserved and loaned to Heart Mountain, where she had been incarcerated.

[22] Following the loan from JANM, Bacon Sakatani, an Advisory Council member of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (HMWF) and personal friend of Ishigo, donated 137 of her pencil sketches.

[2] The draft of Lone Heart Mountain is housed as part of the Estelle Ishigo Papers at the Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections of UCLA.