Painter and theater artist Roger Shimomura addresses socio-political issues of ethnicity in his work. Shimomura spent two early years in Minidoka, Idaho, in a concentration camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. This experience and the 56-year diaries of his immigrant grandmother have influenced his investigations into Asian American stereotypes, which he confronts in his paintings. He began teaching at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, in 1969 and retired in 2004, when he started the Shimomura Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment to foster faculty research in the Department of Art.