Hiroshi Watanabe is a California-based Japanese photographer. Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan in 1951, Watanabe graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company. He obtained an MBA from UCLA in 1993, but two years later his earlier interest in photography revived. In 2000, he closed the production company in order to devote himself entirely to art and became a full-time photographer. His work has been published around the world, and has been exhibited in many galleries across the United States and Japan.