Sawako Goda (1940–2016) was born in Kōchi City, Japan, and studied at Musashino Art School in Tokyo. Encouraged by the poet and painter Shuzo Takiguchi, she held her first solo exhibition at Ginhodo Gallery in Ginza in 1965. inaugurating a decades-long practice that moved fluidly between object-making, painting, photography. Her work was anchored in Tokyo’s experimental underground. She designed stage sets and promotional art for Juro Kara’s Jokyo Gekijo and Shuji Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki, and collaborated with figures including photographer Eikoh Hosoe and poet Kazuko Shiraishi. She exhibited widely across Tokyo’s major commercial venues including Lunami Gallery, Muramatsu Gallery, Sei Gallery, and Shibuya PARCO, and in 1974 was included in the prestigious Japan International Art Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Over the following decades her work was included in over fifteen museum exhibitions across Japan, from the Saitama and Gunma Prefectural Museums of Modern Art to the Kōchi Prefectural Art Museum, reflecting sustained institutional recognition throughout her career. In 1982, she participated in an exhibition at Franklin Furnace in New York. In 1985, she relocated with her daughters to a Nubian village outside Aswan, Egypt, a country she had visited repeatedly since 1978, before returning to Japan the following year.

Her career was posthumously crowned by a major retrospective, No path and no plan to return, held at the Museum of Art, Kochi and Mitaka City Gallery of Art in 2022–2023.The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan, Mitaka City Gallery of Art, Mitaka, Japan, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.