Teshigahara was born in
Tokyo, the son of
Sōfu Teshigahara, founder and grand master of the
Sōgetsu-ryū school of
ikebana. He graduated in 1950 from the
Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and began working in documentary film. He directed his first feature film,
Pitfall (1962), in collaboration with author
Kōbō Abe and musician
Toru Takemitsu. The film won the
NHK New Director's award, and throughout the 1960s, he continued to collaborate on films with Abe and Takemitsu while simultaneously pursuing his interest in
ikebana and sculpture on a professional level. From 1958 to 1971, he served as the director of the
Sogetsu Art Center, a pioneering venue for avant-garde art. Many of his friends (
Yuji Takahashi,
Toshi Ichiyanagi,
Kyoko Kishida,
Toru Takemitsu, Fusako Shuzui,
Genpei Akasegawa,
Kiyoshi Awazu) and collaborators from SAC later joined forces to work on his feature films. In 1965, the Teshigahara/Abe film
Woman in the Dunes (1964) was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won the
Special Jury Prize at the
Cannes Film Festival. Although the original director's cut of
Woman in the Dunes was 147 minutes, he cut it down to 124 minutes when he was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. In 1972, he worked with Japanese researcher and translator
John Nathan to make
Summer Soldiers, a film set during the
Vietnam War about American deserters living on the fringe of Japanese society. From the mid-1970s onwards, he worked less frequently on feature films as he concentrated more on documentaries, exhibitions and the Sogetsu School and became grand master of the school in 1980. In 1980, after the death of his father, Teshigahara became the third generation
Iemoto of Sogetsu School, using bamboo at his large-scale solo exhibitions at several well known museums, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art in
Seoul,
Korea (1989),
Palazzo Reale in
Milan,
Italy (1995), and the
Kennedy Center in
Washington, D.C. (1996), among other venues. In Japan, Teshigahara displayed his art installations nationwide, including Gen-Ichiro Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art in
Marugame and
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. In the 1990s, he pushed the art form of renka, which is a series of impromptu Ikebana arranged by multiple artists. Teshigahara was also involved in ceramics calligraphy and
installation art. ==Collections==