Jerome Nakagawa made his first piece of jewelry after more than ten years behind a camera. He grew up in Hayward, California, spent his summers with family on the Navajo reservation in Shiprock, and earned a political science degree from UC Berkeley before training in photojournalism at Ohio University. His photographs ran in the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Sports Illustrated, and he was the inaugural recipient of the Sandy Colton Memorial Award at the Eddie Adams Workshop.

Around 40, he felt a pull toward his Navajo and Japanese heritage that brought him to Santa Fe and the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he graduated in 2022 with a focus on jewelry and metals. He has since apprenticed with Keri Ataumbi of Ataumbi Metals and with Cody Sanderson. His work draws on the metalworking traditions of both cultures, from Hopi-pioneered overlay to anticlastic cuffs hand-stamped with Japanese asanoha, seigaiha, and shippō patterns, and he calls it "a three-dimensional journal of my learning about each of my cultures."

In the video, Jerome talks about leaving photojournalism behind, returning to his cultures later in life, and why every piece still comes with a little "here goes nothing."