Angela Aki

Kiyomi Angela Aki (安藝 聖世美 アンジェラ, Aki Kiyomi Anjera; born September 15, 1977) known professionally as Angela Aki (アンジェラ・アキ, Anjera Aki), is a Japanese pop singer, songwriter and pianist.

Aki was born in the small town of Itano in Tokushima Prefecture, in the mostly rural island of Shikoku. Her mother is Italian American and her father is Japanese.

Aki began to take piano lessons when she was three years old. She lived in Tokushima through sixth grade and spent her junior high school days in Okayama. She has admitted that growing up in rural Japan proved very difficult, as she was bullied and she turned to the piano as an escape from the isolation she felt. She grew up listening to a mix of enka, The Carpenters and The Bee Gees.

Aki moved to Hawaii when she was fifteen years old and attended the Hawaii Preparatory Academy, but transferred to and graduated from Iolani School. She speaks English and Japanese. She was immersed in music there for four years. She graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and majored in political science.

Angela's first marriage was to an engineer, producer and artist Tony Alany, who co-produced her first album These Words in Vienna, Virginia, USA. On March 9, 2007, Aki announced that she had married Japanese A&R director and publisher Taro Hamano, and made public that she had been briefly married previously and got divorced. In September 2011, she announced that she was pregnant. In February 2012, she announced that she had given birth to her first child, a baby boy.

She is good friends with J-Pop star Yuna Ito. The singers attended the same Japanese language school.

Janis Ian is her mentor and friend.

After putting her music career on hiatus in 2014, Aki attended University of Southern California to study music composition until 2016. After, she moved with her husband and son to Nashville. She also took classes at Berklee College of Music.