She teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature.

[3] In 1985, Ozeki moved to New York City and began working as an art director and production designer[4] for low-budget horror movies, including Mutant Hunt (1987)[5] and Robot Holocaust (1986).

[10] Ozeki's second film, Halving the Bones (1995), tells the autobiographical story of her journey as she brings her grandmother's remains home from Japan.

[14] Her second novel, All Over Creation (Viking Penguin, 2003), focuses on a potato-farming family in Idaho and an environmental activist group opposing the use of GMOs.

Ozeki's 2013 novel, A Tale for the Time Being (Viking Penguin) tells the story of a mysterious diary written by a troubled schoolgirl in Tokyo that has washed ashore on the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada in the wake of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

[21][22] About a 14-year-old boy who begins to hear voices emanating from things in the house after the death of his father, the book won the Women's Prize for Fiction in June 2022.

She is married to the German-Canadian environmental artist Oliver Kellhammer, who teaches on the faculty of Sustainable Systems at Parsons School of Design in New York City.