Liza Dalby is an anthropologist specializing in Japanese culture. Her 1983 book, Geisha, based on her experiences conducting fieldwork among these traditional entertainers, was made into a CBS television movie in 1985. She lived in Japan, Hong Kong, and Seoul from 1988 -91 while researching and writing Kimono: Fashioning Culture. She served as a consultant and commentator for the1999 Atlantic Productions documentary The Secret Life of the Geisha, and has been retained as a consultant for Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation of Arthur Golden's novel, Memoirs of a Geisha.
In 1998, she received a grant from the Japan Foundation to go to Kyoto to finish researching and writing her novel, The Tale of Murasaki about the eleventh-century Heian writer, Murasaki Shikibu. She lives with her husband and three children in Berkeley, California.
