Aya Kanai

Aya Kanai (born 1978) is the current Head of Editorial and Creative at Google Shopping. She is also an American fashion editor who formerly served as the Editor in Chief of Marie Claire and the Chief Fashion Director for Hearst Publications, and supervised the magazines Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and Woman's Day. She also serves as one of the judges on the Lifetime reality TV series Project Runway: Junior. Kanai is a former Head of Content and Creator Partnerships at Pinterest.

Biography Early life and work Kanai was born in 1978 to parents with artistic backgrounds, her father being a graphic designer and her mother working for the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake. She has stated that "Art was always a very normal part of my upbringing." As she grew up, Kanai considered careers in fine art and puppetry, and enjoyed fashion and performance art. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio, focusing in art and East Asian studies, and also studying religion. During her junior year, she interned for the fashion department at New York magazine.

Graduating from Oberlin with a degree in visual art, she won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study puppet theater, conducting research in countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, France, and Japan. Upon returning to the United States, Kanai worked at a vegan restaurant in the East Village, Manhattan neighborhood of , also performing at puppet theater venues such as La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and St. Ann's Warehouse.

After being cast in Ping Chong's Obon, a puppet performance piece, Kanai traveled internationally for a year and a half before deciding on a career change, remarking retrospectively in an interview that she realized: "Wait a minute: This is not my path. I was at the top of my game, performing in the show everyone wants to be in, but I couldn't imagine doing it forever. And if you're 23 and you've hit the wall, you've got to figure out something else to do." She left Marie Claire and joined Pinterest as the head of content and editorial partnerships in September 2020. She also serves as one of the three judges for Lifetime reality TV series Project Runway: Junior.

Kanai lives in Brooklyn, in New York City. She gave birth to her first child via in vitro fertilisation in 2018.