After serving two terms on the board of directors, Dianne Fukami has been re-elected to a second term as president of the board of directors of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC), the nonprofit announced Feb. 3.

Over the past 20 years, Fukami has had extensive firsthand experience with the JCCCNC. As a news executive at KPIX TV channel 5, she emceed several events for the Center. And as a parent, her two daughters have attended various Halloween and Children’s Day festivities, and both participated in the Shinzen USA Nikkei Youth Goodwill Program.

More recently her youngest daughter has been a participant in the JCCCNC’s Nikkei Youth Heritage Program, which entails college aged students’ participating in a home stay in Kobe for a month while going to school to learn the Japanese language and customs.

As co-founder and president of Bridge Media Inc., Fukami specializes in media consulting and producing video and television projects, and won an Emmy Award for a documentary on the Chinese Exclusion Act. She is also a faculty member at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where she teaches courses on television news production.

Fukami has written, directed, and co-produced many documentaries about the Japanese American experience that have been televised locally and nationally on PBS stations. Throughout her career, she has remained active in the Asian and Japanese American communities, producing videos for a number of community groups including Asian American Recovery Services, Japanese Community Youth Council, Japanese Services of the East Bay, Asian American Bar Association, National Japanese American Historical Society, the Japanese American Citizens League and JCCCNC. She was also a founding member of the Sansei Live! Committee for Kimochi in the 1980s.

Fukami’s goals during her tenure are to expand the membership base of the JCCCNC, to find new ways to generate revenue for the organization, and to take steps to ensure the viability of the JCCCNC for the next 50 years so that future generations of Nikkei will have a place to call home in San Francisco’s Japantown.