Yoko Sakurai is an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College. She received her MA in Applied Linguistics and Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language from Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. She started her career as a Japanese language teacher in Tokyo, and later she has been teaching at several institutions in New York. From 2012 to 2019, she taught at The Japan Foundation New York as a principal lecturer. She is a certified ACTFL OPI tester.