Yayoi Kambara has been a Bay Area artist since 2000. Kambara was a company member with ODC/Dance 2003–2015 and danced as a freelance artist with numerous Bay Area Dance Companies including Sara Shelton Mann Contraband, Scott Wells and Dancers, Flyaway Productions, Deborah Slater Dance Theater, STEAMROLLER, and Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians. She was the Rehearsal Director for AXIS Dance Company during Judith Smith's sabbatical in 2015 and continues to teach company class for AXIS. Kambara currently choreographs and creates staging for Opera Parallel, and Center for Contemporary Opera integrating visual design, including film, with voice and physical storytelling.

KAMBARA+ was founded in 2015 after her retirement from ODC Dance as a vehicle to produce her choreography, focusing on producing dance performance experiences that cultivate a sense of belonging. KAMBARA+ defines equity as belonging. As a creative partner in the studio, performer, or in the audience, belonging is the bridge built to narrate and perform new dynamic works. In her choreographic work, Kambara is interested in the authentic voice of the body and its inherent identity in performance. She focuses her choreography on diverse cultural, economic, and ethnic differences by creating space for empathy and dialogue. In a world becoming alarmingly more conservative and segregated, taking time to create with a diverse cast is her way of preserving optimism as dance can represent the ineffable resiliency of the human spirit to continue in the face of uncertainty.

Currently Kambara is curating a dance performance series at the Asian Art Museum responding to the varied diasporic histories within the Asian American community. She is finishing the final months of the 4th cohort of Association of Performing Arts Professionals Leadership Fellows, a program co-directed by Kenneth Foster and Krista Bradely. She is also a lead artist for Hope Mohr Dance's Bridge Project and leads Aesthetic Shift, a yearlong Community Engagement Residency. Aesthetic Shift is an exchange between dance educators, social justice activists, dancers and choreographers dedicated to interrogating and analyzing the overlap between equity values, creative practices, and organizations.