At the age of eleven, her father's company moved the family to the United States[3] where they settled in Westchester County, New York, and lived there for four years before returning to Japan.

[4][2] According to Shimizu, attending middle school in the US encouraged a sense of individuality in her that she would take back to Japan and that was not customary for women in the Japanese culture of the time.

[7] After many years of working in PR Shimizu realized that women in the firm who had been there for multiple decades were not advancing and decided to pursue an MFA in illustration in the United States.

Under Marshall Arisman she created a personal alphabet book project called Letters of Desire as part of her graduate studies.

[10] Upon completion of her MFA, Shimizu moved into a Manhattan studio with two other friends, John Hendrix and Katie Yamasaki, both of whom she had met in grad school.

Between 2007 and 2010, Shimizu illustrated 33 CD insert covers for Now Hear This, which was a recommended music listening list published by the UK magazine The World.

[2] In her first cover for the series, Shimizu displayed many of the stylistic trademarks that would later brand her as an innovator in the field of illustration by setting the mood of the big picture of the story.

She often cuts the watercolor paper, then spends hours, and sometimes days drawing with a Japanese brush that is specifically designed to write sutra as part of Buddhist practice.

Using the loose sketch as a starting point, Shimizu tries to imagine and execute the details of the work as they are inked to make the final drawing process fluid.

[11] Shimizu does all preliminary work on archival thick photo-copy paper, and stores these in a clear pocket for each project, which are organized in order.